The CRU graph. Note that it
is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny
amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The
horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole
graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees
-- thus showing ZERO warming

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in
many people that causes them to delight in going without material
comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people --
with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many
Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct
too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they
have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an
ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us
all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Dissecting Leftism. For a list of backups viewable at times when the main blog is "down", see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************

29 April, 2014

A radical idea

Whether or not man has caused global warming isn’t really the question.

The
question that we’re asking now is to what extent the so-called climate
change models have predictive value, when in fact, 114 out of 117
predictions made in regards to global warming have proven wrong.

Warming
forecasts have consistently overstated the amount of warming that’s
happening. They also missed the decade and a half long pause in global
warming that we’re currently experiencing.

Dr. Roy Spencer has estimated that as many as 95% of the global warming models have just been flat out wrong.

Perhaps
this is a radical idea, but maybe, just maybe, the settled science
crowd ought to consider this: Maybe global warming is the Earth’s
natural way of providing for a more hospitable environment for a growing
human population. Warmer weather, more food? That kind of thing?

Because the real threat to man’s existence isn’t global warming, but rather in a new Ice Age.

If man actually exerts an upward pressure in global temperatures, then thank God for man.

Can the rest of America afford its Alice in Wonderland energy policies? (Can California?)

California
loves to be seen as the trendsetter on energy and environmental
policies. But can we really afford to adopt their laws and regulations
in the rest of America? Heck, can the once Golden State afford them
itself? The path to hell is paved with good intentions,
counter-productive policies - and hypocrisy.

The official
national unemployment rate is stuck at 6.7% - but with much higher rates
for blacks and Hispanics and a labor participation rate that
remains the lowest in 35 years. Measured by gross national product, our
economy is growing at an abysmal 1.5% or even 1.0% annual rate.

Meanwhile,
California's jobless rate is higher than in all but three other states:
8.1% - and with far worse rates as high as 15% for blacks, Hispanics
and inland communities. First the good news, then the insanity.

Citigroup's
Energy 2020: North America report estimates that the United States,
Canada and Mexico could make North America almost energy independent in
six years, simply by tapping their vast recoverable oil and natural gas
reserves. Doing so would help lower energy and consumer prices, insulate
the three nations from volatile or blackmailing foreign suppliers, and
spur job creation based on reliable, affordable energy, says the U.S.
Energy Information Administration.

Driving this revolution is
horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. According to Citigroup,
IHS Global Insights, the EIA and other analysts, "fracking" technology
contributed 2.1 million jobs and $285 billion to the US economy in 2013,
while adding $62 billion to local, state and federal treasuries!
Compare that to mandates and subsidies required for expensive,
unreliable, job-killing wind, solar and biofuel energy.

Fracking
also slashed America's oil imports from 60% of its total needs in 2005
to just 28% in 2013. It slashed our import bill by some $100 billion
annually.

By 2020 the government share of this boom is expected
to rise to $111 billion. By 2035, U.S. oil and natural gas operations
could inject over $5 trillion in cumulative capital expenditures into
the economy, while contributing $300 billion a year to GDP and
generating over $2.5 trillion in cumulative additional government
revenues. What incredible benefits! But there's more.

A Yale
University study calculates that the drop in natural gas prices (from $8
per thousand cubic feet or million Btu in 2008, and much more on the
spot market, to $4.00 or so now) is saving businesses and families over
$125 billion a year in heating, electricity, fertilizer and raw material
feed stock costs.

The only thing standing in the way of a US
employment boom and economic and industrial renaissance, says Citigroup,
is politics: continued or even more oppressive anti-hydrocarbon
policies and regulations.

Here's the insanity. Fully 96% of this
nation's oil and gas production increase took place on state and private
lands. Production fell significantly on federal lands under President
Obama's watch, with the Interior Department leasing only 2% of federal
offshore lands and 6% of its onshore domain for petroleum, then
slow-walking drilling permits, according to the Institute for Energy
Research.

The President continues to stall on the Keystone
pipeline, while threatening layers of expensive carbon dioxide and other
regulations, to prevent what he insists is "dangerous manmade climate
change." His EPA just adopted California's expensive all-pain-no-gain
rules for sulfur in gasoline, and the Administration and
environmentalists constantly look to the West Coast for policy guidance.

Governor
Jerry Brown says 30 million vehicles in California translate into "a
lot of oil" and "the time for no more oil drilling" will be when its
residents "can get around without using any gasoline." However, that
rational message has not reached the state's legislators, environmental
activists or urban elites.

California's ruling classes strongly
oppose drilling and fracking - and leading Democrats are campaigning
hard to impose at least a long temporary ban, based on ludicrous claims
that fracking causes groundwater contamination and even earthquakes and
birth defects.

Meanwhile, California's oil production represents
just 38% of its needs - and is falling steadily, even though the state
has enormous onshore and offshore oil deposits, accessible via
conventional and hydraulic fracturing technologies. The state imports
12% of its oil from Alaska and 50% more from foreign nations, much of it
from Canada, notes Sacramento area energy consultant Tom Tanton.

The
record is far worse when it comes to electricity. The Do-As-I-Say state
imports about 29% of its total electricity from out of state: via the
Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Phoenix, coal-fired generators in the
Four Corners area, and hydroelectric dams in the Southwest and Pacific
Northwest, Tanton explains.

Another 50% of its electricity is
generated using natural gas that is also imported from sources outside
California. Instead, the Greener-Than-Thou State relies heavily on gas
imported via pipelines from Canada, the Rockies and the American
Southwest, to power its gas-fired turbines. Those turbines and
out-of-state sources also back up its numerous unreliable bird-killing
wind turbines.

It adds up to a great way to preen and strut about
their environmental consciousness. They simply leach off their
neighbors for 62% of their gasoline and 79% of their electricity, and
let other states do the hard work and emit the CO2.

These foreign
fuels power the state's profitable and liberal Silicon Valley and
entertainment industries - as well as the heavily subsidized electric
and hybrid vehicles that wealthy elites so love for their
pseudo-ecological benefits, $7,500 tax credits, and automatic entry into
fast-moving HOV lanes.

Meanwhile, California's poor white,
black, Hispanic and other families get to pay $4.23 per gallon for
regular gasoline, the second highest price in America - and 16.2 cents
per kWh for residential electricity, double that in most states, and
behind only New York, New England, Alaska and Hawaii.

However,
the state's eco-centric ruling classes are not yet satisfied. Having
already hammered large industrial facilities with costly carbon dioxide
cap-and-trade regulations, thereby driving more jobs out of the state,
on January 1, 2015 they will impose cap-and-trade rules on gasoline and
diesel fuels. That will instantly add at least 12 cents more per gallon,
with the price escalating over the coming years.

Regulators are
also ginning up tough new "low-carbon fuel standards," requiring that
California's transportation fuels reduce their "carbon intensity" or
"life-cycle" CO2 emissions by 10% below 2010 levels. This will be
accomplished by forcing refiners and retailers to provide more
corn-based ethanol, biodiesel and still-nonexistent cellulosic biofuel.

These
fuels are much more expensive than even cap-tax-and-trade gasoline -
which means the poor families that liberals care so deeply about will be
forced to pay still more to drive their cars and trucks.

In
fact, Charles River Associates estimates that the LCFS will raise the
cost of gasoline and diesel by up to 170% (!) over the next ten years,
on top of all the other price hikes.

In the meantime, China,
India, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany and a hundred other countries are
burning more coal, driving more cars and emitting vastly more carbon
dioxide. So the alleged benefits to global atmospheric CO2 levels range
from illusory and fabricated to fraudulent.

Of course, commuters
who cannot afford these soaring prices can always park their cars and
add a few hours to their daily treks, by taking multiple buses to work,
school and other activities.

There's more, naturally. Much more. But I'm out of space and floundering amid all the lunacy.

Can
we really afford to inflict California's insane policies on the rest of
America? In fact, how long can the Left Coast afford to let its ruling
classes inflict those policies on its own citizens?

Five
meters of ice– about 16 feet thick - is threatening the survival of
polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea region along Alaska’s Arctic
coast, according to Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an evolutionary biologist in
British Columbia who has studied polar bears for most of her 35-year
career.

That’s because the thick ice ridges could prevent ringed
seals, the bears’ major prey, from creating breathing holes they need to
survive in the frigid waters, Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“Prompted
by reports of the heaviest sea ice conditions on the East Coast ‘in
decades’ and news that ice on the Great Lakes is, for mid-April, the
worst it’s been since records began, I took a close look at the ice
thickness charts for the Arctic,” Crockford noted in her Polar Bear
Science blog on April 18th.

“Sea ice charts aren’t a guarantee
that this heavy spring ice phenomenon is developing in the Beaufort, but
they could be a warning,” she wrote, noting that they "don't bode well"
for the Beaufort bears.

“What happens is that really thick ice
moves in because currents and winds from Greenland and the Canadian
islands push it against the shore,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.

“The
male seals arrive in the area in early spring to set up breeding
territories. They drill a hole through the ice to maintain breathing
holes close to the shore. But there’s a limit. They can drill through
two meters (about seven feet) of ice. But too much beyond that and
they’re in trouble.”

“The reason that’s important is that seals
mate right after the pups, who are born in April, are weaned. So the
male seal wants to be there, but he has to have breathing holes. If the
ice is too thick, he has to move off someplace else,” she explained.

But
this is the same time that female polar bears are just emerging with
their newborn cubs from maternity dens either on or near the shore.

“When
those bears come out of their dens in the spring, they need to find
seals right away because they will have gone six months without eating,”
Crockford said. “If there are no seals, they have to go further out,
where there’s thinner ice.”

“Spring and early summer are really a
critical time for polar bears. That’s when they need to eat as many
seals as they can because that’s when they put on fat for the rest of
the year. If they have trouble doing that in the spring, they’re in big
trouble.”

There were comparably high levels of spring ice in the
Beaufort Sea in 2004 and 2006, when bear counts were “one of the pieces
of evidence used to have the bears listed as ‘threatened’ in the U.S.,”
Crockford pointed out.

“Polar bear biologists were finding some
bears quite thin and found a population decline,” she said, which they
attributed to melting summer ice caused by global warming.

“But
the biologists were not there to see the thick [spring] ice. All they
saw was thin bears,” she pointed out. “They blamed the poor condition of
the bears on summer ice, instead of acknowledging that it was likely
the condition of the ice in the spring that was the cause of the
problem.”

“Female [polar bears] with cubs having trouble feeding
are one aspect of the repercussions of thick ice,” Crockford added. “The
other repercussion is that other bears, instead of hanging around and
starving, probably left the area. They could have gone to the Chukchi
Sea, which is located between the U.S. and Russia near the Bering
Strait.”

The U.S. Geological Survey conducted a polar bear
population survey for the area in 2006. It reported a decline in the
adult polar bear population and reduced cub survival rates, which was
used to list the bears as a “threatened species” in the U.S. by the U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service in 2008.

Keystone Pipeline Protesters: ‘Man Camps’ Could Lead to Sexual Assaults of Native Americans

Native
Americans opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline said its construction
could lead to Native American women being sexually assaulted, according
to news reports from a protest held this week on the National Mall.
However, a workers’ union that supports the pipeline said such claims
were “disgusting” and harmful to the “hard-working people who build
America.”

“We are worried about man camps that are coming to our
territory,” Faith Spotted Eagle, an elder with the Yankton Sioux of
North Dakota, said at the protest, as reported by Politico.

Spotted
Eagle said the mostly male encampments that would be put in place to
house those working on the pipeline posed a threat to Native American
women.

“We have seen our women suffer,” she said. “One out of
three women in our nation have been sexually assaulted by non-native
people.”

Members of tribes from states along the path where the
pipeline would be built to transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada to
the U.S. Gulf Coast joined non-tribal protestors in a coalition called
the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance.”

“We have stopped the pipeline
in its tracks for the last five years,” protestor Jane Kleeb of the
environmental group Bold Nebraska, said at the protest.

Rosebud Sioux President Cyrill Scott told BuzzFeed that some of the man camps would have as many as 600 men.

“I am very concerned these transient workers are going to come onto our land and violate our people,” Scott said.

“There will be violence and sexual assault from Keystone,” Aldo Seoane, another Rosebud Souix, said at the protest.

Some
news reports cited Department of Justice statistics that state
“American Indians are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault
crimes compared to all other races, and one in three Indian women
reports having been raped during her lifetime.”

But the statistics do include information about the perpetrators.

Concerning
the sexual assault claims by the coalition, the Laborers’ International
Union of North America (LiUNA), which has 500,000 members, said the
assertions were besmirching hard-working Americans.

“It’s
disgusting that some anti-worker operatives in Washington would feel so
desperate to find another attack on a job-creating pipeline that they
would resort to such baseless smears against the hard working people who
build America," LiUNA Communications Director Richard Greer told
CNSNews.com.

As for the Obama administration’s decision on April
18 to further delay approval of Keystone, LiUNA President Terry
O’Sullivan in a press release said: “They waited until Good Friday,
believing no one would be paying attention. The only surprise is they
didn’t wait to do it in the dark of night.”

“It’s not the oil
that’s dirty, it’s the politics,” said O’Sullivan. “Once again,
the administration is making a political calculation instead of doing
what is right for the country. This certainly is no example of profiles
in courage. It’s clear the administration needs to grow a set of
antlers, or perhaps take a lesson from Popeye and eat some spinach.”

“This
is another low blow to the working men and women of our country for
whom the Keystone XL Pipeline is a lifeline to good jobs and energy
security,” said the LiUNA president.

According to the Bold
Nebraska website, the Cowboy and Indian Alliance – or CIA – will hold a
“traditional water ceremony” outside of Secretary of State John Kerry’s
home where they will be “praying that the Secretary listen to his
conscience and the science and reject Keystone XL.”

On April 18,
the State Department announced the pipeline decision was being delayed
again after more than five years of review of the project. Keystone XL
falls under the agency’s jurisdiction because it involves the crossing
of an international border.

Keystone is a proposed 1,179-mile
36-inch diameter pipeline that would transport crude oil from Hardisty,
Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Neb., according to the website of
TransCanada, the company in charge of the project.

“Along with
transporting crude oil from Canada, the Keystone XL Pipeline will also
support the significant growth of crude oil production in the United
States from producers in the Bakken region of Montana and North Dakota,”
the explanation on the company’s website stated.

Environmental
Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on Monday took aim at
critics who try to "vilify the work of reputable scientists and EPA."

"To
those calling EPA untrustworthy and unpopular -- newsflash! People like
us," she said in a speech at the National Academy of Science. "They
want safe drinking water. They want healthy air. And they expect us to
follow the science -- just as the law demands."

McCarthy, in her
prepared remarks, stressed the "bedrock science" behind "sensible
regulatory standards," such as the Clean Air Act.

And she said "a small but vocal group of critics" are trying to prevent the EPA from doing the job Congress directed it to do:

"People
are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts," she said.
"You can't just claim the science isn't real when it doesn't align well
with your political or financial interests. Science is real and
verifiable. With the health of our families and our futures at stake,
the American people expect us to act on the facts, not spend precious
time and taxpayer money refuting manufactured uncertainties."

She
pointed to the threat of climate change, evidenced by "more frequent
and intense heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms to more smog and
asthma." She said climate change "has put our health and economic risks
on steroids," and cannot be ignored.

"Using the best science we
have to offer, our next U.S. National Climate Assessment is about to be
finalized. From coastal cities to the Great Plains, we have to use that
science to prepare and to plan. Just like we use the science on mercury,
acid rain, ozone pollution, particulate matter and more.

"To
reduce the risks that threaten our health and safety, we need to listen
to climate science. We cannot let those same critics of science continue
to manufacture uncertainties that stop us from taking urgently needed
climate action."

Over
the past decade, Americans have clustered into three broad groups on
global warming. The largest, currently describing 39% of U.S. adults,
are what can be termed "Concerned Believers" -- those who attribute
global warming to human actions and are worried about it. This is
followed by the "Mixed Middle," at 36%. And one in four Americans -- the
"Cool Skeptics" -- are not worried about global warming much or at all.

Gallup Global Warming Opinion Groups

The
rate of Concerned Believers has varied some over the past decade and
half, but is currently identical to the earliest estimate, from 2001.
Over the same period of time, the ranks of Cool Skeptics have swelled,
while the Mixed Middle -- once the largest group -- has declined
modestly.

These groupings stem from a special "cluster" analysis
of four questions that measure Americans' belief and concerns about
human-induced global warming, all of which have been asked together on
Gallup's annual Environment survey seven times since 2001. The latest
results are from the March 6-9, 2014, Environment poll. However, the
groupings derive from analysis of seven years of combined data.

Gallup
has recently reported on a number of the individual trends included in
the cluster analysis as part of its Climate Change series. This analysis
provides a unique way of summarizing Americans' overall stance on
global warming.

Perceived Cause of Global Warming Is Major Discriminator

Concerned
Believers and Cool Skeptics are of entirely different mindsets when it
comes to how much they worry about global warming. Concerned Believers
say they worry "a great deal" or "fair amount" about the issue, while
Cool Skeptics worry only "a little" or "not at all." Additionally,
Concerned Believers think media reports about the issue are either
correct or underestimated, while Cool Skeptics think they are
exaggerated. And, most starkly, 100% of Concerned Believers say the rise
in the Earth's temperature over the last century is due to the effects
of pollution, while 100% of Cool Skeptics say it is due to natural
changes in the environment. Finally, two-thirds of Concerned Believers
believe global warming will pose a serious threat to their own way of
life in the future, while 100% of Cool Skeptics disagree.

Americans
in the Mixed Middle are individuals who hold a combination of views.
For instance, some believe humans are the cause of the Earth's warming,
but aren't worried about it. Others say global warming is a natural
phenomenon, but that it will pose a serious risk in their lifetime. In
one way or another, those in the Mixed Middle fail to line up with the
orthodoxy on either side of the climate science issue.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

The
green energy orgy in Germany is over. The music has stopped and the
wine that once flowed freely has long run out. The green energy whores
and pimps can go home.

In a stunning admission by Germany’s
Economics Minister and Vice Chancellor to Angela Merkel, Sigmar Gabriel
announced in a recent speech that the country’s once highly ballyhooed
transformation to renewable energy, the so called Energiewende, a model
that has been adopted by a number of countries worldwide, is “on the
verge of failure“.

Speaking at an event at SMA Solar, Germany’s
leading manufacturer of solar technology, Gabriel even dropped yet
another admission bomb: "The truth is that in all fields we
under-estimated the complexity of the Energiewende.”

Gabriel is
not only the national economics minister and vice chancellor to Angela
Merkel, he is also head of Germany’s socialist SPD party, which is now
the coalition partner in Angela Merkel’s CDU/SPD grand coalition
government. Moreover Gabriel was once the country’s environment minister
and a devout believer in global warming and in Al Gore’s Inconvenient
Truth.

In the speech Gabriel tells the audience how the energy
transformation is on the verge of failure: "Those who are the engines of
the transformation to renewable energies, that’s you, you don’t see how
close we are to the failure of the energy transformation.”

Gabriel
says that major reforms are thus unavoidable, and he calls efforts for
energy consumers to get off the grid “pure madness”. That’s not what
they want after all. Gabriel is now calling on companies who produce
green energy for their own use to ante up as well: "The complete
exemption from paying feed-in tariffs is a model that is wonderful for
you as a business model, but is one that is a problem for everyone
else.”

The solar energy audience reacts with dead, stunned silence (3:03). That can’t believe what they just heard.

The
mood at SMA Solar, which has been a huge benefactor of the renewable
energy subsidies brought on by Germany’s EEG feed-in act, was somber and
shock and Gabriel delivered the reality. Many in attendance seemed
unable to fathom what Gabriel was unloading: the heady days at the green
energy feeding trough are over – live with it.

The European
Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) here writes: "The
responsible persons in attendance at the Hessen-based photovoltaic SMA
Solar and all the other profiteers of the EEG feed-in act saw their jaws
drop when this late and blunt admission was made.”

That Gabriel
would make such comments can only tell us that the situation and the
costs surrounding the Energiewende must be far more dire than most of us
realize.

Germany’s renewable energy gravy train has derailed for good. Other countries take note!

Finally,
give credit to Gabriel for not shying away from what needs to be done
and for taking the responsibilities as economics minister very
seriously. Finally a person in power who gets it!

The
Ukrainian crisis has again put German energy policy in the spotlight.
As long as Europe’s green energy is expensive and unreliable, it favours
Russian gas and leaves the continent’s energy policy unsustainable.

Germany’s
energiewende, the country’s move away from nuclear and fossil fuels
towards renewable energies has been regarded by some commentators as an
example for the rest of the world. But now Germany shows the globe how
not to make green policy. It is failing the poor, while protecting
neither energy security nor the climate.

Last month, the
government said that 6.9m households live in energy poverty, defined as
spending more than 10 per cent of their income on energy. This is
largely a result of the surcharge for renewable energy. Between 2000 and
2013, electricity prices for households have increased 80 per cent in
real terms, according to data from the OECD and the International Energy
Agency.

This means more and more money is going from the poor to
the rich. Low-income tenants in the Ruhr area or Berlin are paying high
energy prices to subsidise wealthy homeowners in Bavaria who put solar
panels on their roofs.

Some have argued that Germany’s energy
policy could be seen as a huge bet on developing the energy of the
future – and if it works, it would secure Germany’s engineering future.

However,
most of Germany’s money was spent, not on research into future
technology, but on buying existing inefficient green technology. Three
weeks ago, in a report to the German parliament, a group of energy
experts delivered a damning indictment of the current subsidies. They
said that the policy has had a “very low technology-specific innovation
impact in Germany”. Essentially, it is much safer for companies to keep
selling more of the old technologies of wind, solar and biomass because
these are already getting huge subsidies instead of trying to develop
new and better technologies that have similar pay-offs but much higher
risk.

The legislation does not offer more protection for the
climate. Instead, it makes such protection much more expensive. “There
is no justification for a continuation of the Renewable Energies Act”,
the report concludes.

German energy policy is an expensive way to
achieve almost nothing. For solar alone, Germany has committed to pay
subsidies of more than €100bn over the next 20 years, even though it
contributes only 0.7 per cent of primary energy consumption. These solar
panels’ net effect for the climate will be to delay global warming by a
mere 37 hours by the end of the century, according to a report cited in
Der Spiegel.

A McKinsey study published earlier this year found
that Germany energy prices for households are now 48 per cent above the
European average. At the same time, European power prices have risen
almost 40 per cent since 2005, while US electricity prices have
declined.

Despite exemptions from renewable obligations for
energy-intensive companies, German industrial power costs are 19 per
cent higher than the EU average. German industrial costs have risen 60
per cent since 2007, compared to increases of about 10 per cent in the
US and China. This makes Germany an ever less attractive place for
industry. German chemical giant BASF has already said it will make most
if its future investments outside of Europe.

Green energy cannot
meet Germany’s need for reliable electricity. That is why Germany still
needs copious amounts of fossil fuels; German CO2-emissions have risen
since the nuclear power phase-out of 2011, despite the incredible
subsidies for renewables.

Germany is an example of how not to do
green energy. Instead the solution is to research and develop better
green energy technology. A study by some of the world’s top climate
economists including three Nobel Laureates for the Copenhagen Consensus
Center shows that subsidising existing renewables does so little good
that for every euro spent, 97 cents are wasted. However, every euro
spent on green innovation could avoid €11 in long-term damages from
global warming.

If we can reduce the price of future green
technology below the cost of fossil fuels, everyone will switch. And
such cheap green energy will not leave us at the mercy of Russia, it
will actually fix global warming – and it will help rather than hurt the
poor.

With
the sun shining down on a shimmering sea, children playing on the beach
and families thronging its cafes and boutiques, Brighton seems the
perfect postcard portrayal of English serenity.

Strolling down
the cheerful promenade, the resort’s celebrated blend of raffish charm
and Regency elegance appear little changed over the years. It is
difficult to imagine this is the home of a civic revolution.

Yet
this is the greenest city in Britain, the launchpad for an attempt to
reshape the nation’s political landscape – and the result is a dismal
farce.

A rising tide of splits, stunts, U-turns, gaffes and
divisive industrial disputes has alienated voters and angered
businesses here in a city better known for its bohemian tolerance, while
outlandish proposals for a ban on bacon butties and plans to use sheep
for traffic calming have earned only derision.

The serious side
of politics has suffered, too – a demonstration of the dangers
that await when protest parties win power. A doomed attempt to impose
the biggest council tax rise in the country ended with humiliating
warnings that Whitehall could be forced to take over the Town Hall.

Starting
with just one councillor in 1996, the Green Party’s rise to power in
Brighton has been unprecedented and rapid. In 2010 there was the
election of Caroline Lucas as the MP for Brighton Pavilion – the party’s
first Westminster seat – and then came the capture of the city council
just a year later.

A clever mix of protest, pavement politics and
promises of change proved popular with residents, many of them families
forced from London by soaring house prices, students, or those
attracted by the city’s liberal approach to life.

In 2011, the
Greens ousted the Conservatives to become the largest group on the
council with 23 seats. According to their leader Jason Kitcat, this was
to be the future of British politics.

It is hard to share his
optimism. The party’s cuddly combination of middle-class idealism and
municipal inexperience has hit the rocks of political reality as it
grapples with a fast-growing city of 275,000 people in tough economic
times.

‘Winning was the worst thing possible for them,’ said one
opposition councillor privately. ‘You can see they still want to be
popular the whole time and dislike responsibility.’

The Green honeymoon was short-lived. Take the surreal story of an elderly elm tree.

First
the Greens voted to upgrade a roundabout in the city called Seven
Dials, but then found that there were protests to protect the
170-year-old tree beside the site. Eco-warriors camped out in the
branches and pinned poems to the trunk. The national media showed an
interest. So the Greens switched sides, joined the campaign to spare the
60ft elm from the chop and then spent a small fortune altering their
own traffic scheme.

Then there was its manifesto pledge for
‘Meat-free Mondays’, which would have banned bacon rolls and beef pies
from council-run staff canteens. It led to complaints from manual
workers and the proposal was ditched.

Residents were
similarly surprised at Green plans to introduce livestock to one
of the main routes into the city as part of a ‘speed reduction
package’. The scheme was deferred after protests.

There have been
times when it seemed that the business of town hall administration was
descending into absurdity on a daily basis.

Brighton was declared
a ‘no fracking zone’, even though there is no prospect of shale gas
drilling in the city. Needless to say, Green councillors have
flocked to anti-fracking protests in nearby Balcombe, where Caroline
Lucas was among dozens arrested last summer. She was cleared of public
order charges last week.

At last month’s council meeting, a
Green member accused a former Tory leader of wearing a swastika. She
wasn’t. It turned out to be a traditional Irish emblem on her necklace.

Yet
beyond the comedy lie serious consequences. After three years of
political mismanagement, Brighton’s citizens face soaring charges for
council services and increasingly scruffy streets. Yesterday, the Greens
were under fresh attack after part of the seafront collapsed into a pub
below. Even recycling levels have fallen to half those achieved by
Tory-run Bournemouth.

The governing party is fatally split with,
inevitably, divisions erupting into the open. Unlike other political
parties, Greens do not ‘whip’ members into line to get policies passed,
and meetings can descend into rows more suited to the Punch and Judy
shows down on the beach.

A slim majority of moderates under
amiable council leader Mr Kitcat have fought ceaseless challenges from a
cabal of hard-Left councillors led by his deputy Phelim Mac Cafferty, a
prominent gay activist.

The different factions are known
as ‘mangos’ (green on the outside yet yellow, like Lib Dems, in the
middle) and ‘watermelons’ (green on the outside but red in the middle).
The groups sit apart in the chamber during council meetings.

So
serious are their differences that outside mediators were reportedly
called in to reconcile the two sides. Mr Kitcat narrowly survived the
latest attempt to depose him only last month – thanks to the support of
his Polish-born wife Ania, a fellow moderate on the council.

So much for the new politics.

When
refuse workers went on strike against efforts to stop long-standing
Spanish practices in working hours and to harmonise pay with female
council staff, they were supported by the watermelons – Mr Mac Cafferty
and eight colleagues.

According to one councillor, some of
these staff earned more than £50,000 a year by manipulating allowances
and overtime payments. ‘They must be the highest paid bin drivers in the
country,’ he said.

The strike last June led to the strange sight
of the council leader telling binmen to get back to work, while his
deputy joined the picket line as rubbish piled up in the streets. Ms
Lucas, the MP, added fuel to the fire by backing the protesters. Earlier
this month, the unions threatened another strike.

Perhaps the
greatest threat to the Green utopia – and the dignity of a proud and
successful city – came two months ago when Mr Kitcat proposed a 4.75 per
cent council tax increase. Supposedly a response to government cuts,
this was interpreted by opponents as an effort to unite his fractious
forces. The huge rise required a local referendum, the first since the
Coalition Government brought in new rules to protect taxpayers. Yet even
holding the vote would have cost at least £300,000.

The whole
initiative was defeated in the council chamber, leading to deadlock over
the budget. Officials warned that a team from Whitehall might have to
take over the running of their city.

Days later, Labour and some
moderate Greens backed a compromise increase just under the two per cent
permitted without the need for a referendum. As Labour leader Warren
Morgan put it: ‘The rise might have been fine for those who can afford
organic food, but not everyone lives in the trendy city centre.’

Then
there was the case of the Christian councillor who opposed gay
marriage. Christina Summers said she was ‘accountable to God above any
political party’, so she was abused by her colleagues and drummed out of
the Green group. ‘I was called everything from a bigot to a
fascist,’ she told me.

‘For some of these people, ideology is far
more important than personal relationships. They just think anyone
identifying as a Christian is against homosexuals.’

Ms Summers
now sits as an independent. ‘I feel very sad, since our election
successes were amazing achievements,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately they have
no understanding what being in government means, which is the need to
show some compromise.’ This from a party that claims on its website to
be committed to ‘a caring, inclusive and democratic society’ that
enables everyone to ‘follow their interests’.

A 74-page report on
‘Trans Equalities Strategy’ to eliminate discrimination and avoid
discomforting transsexuals asked for gender- neutral toilets and
transgender-only sports sessions. Doctors were also urged to stop
identifying patients according to gender on forms at GPs’ surgeries.

Residents
are being offered the category ‘Mx’ (for Mixter) alongside Mr, Ms and
Mrs on council forms. This prevents ‘an unnecessary sense of exclusion
and frustration to be forced to accept a title that doesn’t
reflect someone’s gender expression.’

Political rivals say that a
Green addiction to gesture politics is changing the nature of the city.
It does not take long to find evidence supporting their claim.

Typical
was the Occupy Brighton camp set up shortly after the Green takeover.
At first it was praised by party councillors. Inevitably, however, the
cluster of tents began to attract people with drink and drug problems.
It was eventually closed down after a fireman was assaulted while
putting out a blaze.

Graham Cox, a Tory councillor and former
head of Sussex CID, said the Green council promoted an image of Brighton
as a place of protest and alternative lifestyles that welcomed the
homeless.

‘They don’t care about things like cutting the grass
and keeping flower-beds tidy, so our town is getting scruffier. They are
basically hippies who don’t give a damn about such things.’

Others
residents I spoke to said the same. And, sure enough, walking back
along the main street connecting Brighton with Hove, I found five
rough-sleepers on one 200-yard stretch amid the smart cafes, food shops
and clothing outlets.

Luke, 47, was sitting on a cardboard sheet
in a shop doorway reading a Wilbur Smith thriller. ‘I came here because I
heard that the facilities were good with drop-in centres and free
food,’ he said, adding that he had been pestered by drug dealers
offering him free samples.

The council has also been accused of
attracting travellers. Its policy was described by one rueful Green
councillor as ‘come in and take over our parks’ – which is precisely
what happened last summer.

Council officials unlocked the gates
for 30 travellers’ caravans to enter Wild Park, the area’s largest
nature reserve with spectacular views over the city.

Their action
– reportedly taken to prevent injuries should the travellers try to
break in – made it harder to evict the group, costing local taxpayers
thousands of pounds in legal fees. This pushed up the bill for dealing
with illegal travellers last year to nearly £200,000, the second highest
in the country.

Yet the gates were unlocked again last month to let in another convoy of 19 caravans.

Little
wonder that a poll last summer found the party plunging to third place
behind the Tories and Labour, a disaster for this fledgling political
force in its heartland.

Time and again I heard complaints over
transport. Parking fees have soared – one woman told me she was giving
up her part-time bar job since it was no longer viable once she had paid
the charges.

As for the business community, one boss of a
Brighton-based green business who was initially delighted when the party
took control of the council told me: ‘Now it’s just embarrassing –
they’re making a pig’s ear of everything.

‘They have fine ideals
but lack any sense of reality. ‘How could they not see that if you
double the price of parking in a downturn, it drives away business?’

At least the cycle lanes look good.

Mr
Kitcat told me he was proud of his party’s record, especially raising
the minimum wage for council staff and contractors and improving
Brighton’s air quality. Yet the council leader – a republican
educated at one of the country’s top public schools – admitted he
was disappointed by the internal dissent.

‘This is the first time
we have been in administration and it is definitely a learning
curve,’ he said. ‘While it is a lot messier than people
going with the party flow, isn’t it quite healthy to have this freedom?’

Caroline
Lucas, whose marginal seat is threatened by the meltdown in the Greens’
popularity, denied the party was any more divided than others in local
politics.

But Ben Duncan, a prominent ‘watermelon’ who has
proposed taxes on tourists and the introduction of ‘cannabis cafes’,
said there were major philosophical differences between Greens seeking
revolutionary change to society and those not wanting to alarm voters.

He
admitted wanting to kick out the council leader. Indeed, in a blog he
said that Mr Kitcat had betrayed both his city and his party.

Contempt
is growing for mainstream politics and, on the eve of local elections
next month, voters must question if they really want more of these
alternative protest politicians actually taking office.

They
might heed the words of one Brighton shopper I met. ‘They seemed
to have so many fresh ideas,’ she told me. ‘Now we just roll our eyes at
any mention of the Greens – they’ve turned out even worse than the
others.’

Top climate expert's sensational claim of government meddling in crucial UN report

A
top US academic has dramatically revealed how government officials
forced him to change a hugely influential scientific report on climate
change to suit their own interests.

Harvard professor Robert
Stavins electrified the worldwide debate on climate change on Friday by
sensationally publishing a letter online in which he spelled out the
astonishing interference.

He said the officials, representing
‘all the main countries and regions of the world’ insisted on the
changes in a late-night meeting at a Berlin conference centre two weeks
ago.

Three quarters of the original version of the document ended up being deleted.

Prof
Stavins claimed the intervention amounted to a serious ‘conflict of
interest’ between scientists and governments. His revelation is
significant because it is rare for climate change experts to publicly
question the process behind the compilation of reports on the subject.

Prof
Stavins, Harvard’s Professor of Business and Government, was one of two
‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of a key report published by the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this month.

His chapter of the 2,000-page original report concerned ways countries can co-operate to reduce carbon emissions.

IPCC
reports are supposed to be scrupulously independent as they give
scientific advice to governments around the world to help them shape
energy policies – which in turn affect subsidies and domestic power
bills.

Prof Stavins said the government officials in Berlin
fought to make big changes to the full report’s ‘summary for
policymakers’. This is the condensed version usually cited by the
world’s media and politicians. He said their goal was to protect their
‘negotiating stances’ at forthcoming talks over a new greenhouse gas
reduction treaty.

Prof Stavins told The Mail on Sunday yesterday
that he had been especially concerned by what happened at a special
‘contact group’. He was one of only two scientists present, surrounded
by ‘45 or 50’ government officials.

He said almost all of them
made clear that ‘any text that was considered inconsistent with their
interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as
unacceptable.’

Many of the officials were themselves climate
negotiators, facing the task of devising a new treaty to replace the
Kyoto Protocol in negotiations set to conclude next year.

Prof
Stavins said: ‘This created an irreconcilable conflict of interest. It
has got to the point where it would be reasonable to call the document a
summary by policymakers, not a summary for them, and it certainly
affects the credibility of the IPCC. The process ought to be reformed.’

He
declined to say which countries had demanded which changes, saying only
that ‘all the main countries and regions were represented’.

Some deletions were made at the insistence of only one or two nations – because under IPCC rules, the reports must be unanimous.

He
revealed the original draft of the summary contained a lot of detail on
how international co-operation to curb emissions might work, and how it
could be funded. The final version contains only meaningless headings,
however, with all details removed.

His comments follow a decision
two weeks earlier by Sussex University’s Professor Richard Tol to
remove his name from the summary of an earlier volume of the full IPCC
report, on the grounds it had been ‘sexed up’ by the same government
officials and had become overly ‘alarmist’.

Prof Stavins’ letter
provoked a response from Bob Ward, policy director of the London School
of Economics’ Grantham Institute and a fierce critic of those who
dissent from climate change orthodoxy.

Mr Ward asked on Twitter whether it showed the ‘IPCC government approval process is broken’.

Yesterday he admitted the affair showed that ‘the IPCC is not a perfect process, though it’s hard to imagine a better one’.

Prof
Judith Curry, the head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, Atlanta, said that between them, Professors Tol and Stavins
had shown the process was ‘polluted by obvious politics’.

British
power station sues government for axeing contract after MoS exposed its
switch from coal to wood from precious U.S. forests

Britain's
biggest power station is suing the Government for losing a lucrative
contract after a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed that it burns
wood from precious US forests as a ‘green’ alternative to coal.

Drax is committed to switching from coal to ‘biomass’, or wood pellets.

In
December, Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey promised the
North Yorkshire plant two lucrative ‘contracts for difference’ – which
would see it earn £105 for every megawatt hour it generates, rather than
the normal price of £50.

The extra money would come from
subsidies funded by consumers’ household bills. But this paper revealed
that much of its biomass is shipped in from historic wetland hardwood
forests – 3,000 miles away in North Carolina.

Environmentalists say this is destroying endangered species’ habitats, and increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Ministers have now withdrawn their promise to guarantee profits for the part of the plant using biomass.

This wiped £400million off the company’s share price and prompted the firm to start legal action.

A spokesman for Mr Davey said: ‘Drax was informed that this project no longer qualifies for the award of contract.’

In
2012, the British Columbia–based Native American Haida tribe launched
an effort to restore the salmon fishery that has provided much of their
livelihood for centuries. Acting collectively, the Haida voted to form
the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, financed it with $2.5 million
of their own savings, and used it to support the efforts of American
scientist-entrepreneur Russ George to demonstrate the feasibility of
open-sea mariculture — in this case, the distribution of 120 tons of
iron sulfate into the northeast Pacific to stimulate a phytoplankton
bloom which in turn would provide ample food for baby salmon.

The verdict is now in on this highly controversial experiment: It worked.

In
fact it has been a stunningly over-the-top success. This year, the
number of salmon caught in the northeast Pacific more than quadrupled,
going from 50 million to 226 million. In the Fraser River, which only
once before in history had a salmon run greater than 25 million fish
(about 45 million in 2010), the number of salmon increased to 72
million.

George writes:

The fish really came back this
fall, a year following our 2012 ocean pasture restoration in the NE
Pacific. The wonderful heartening news is they came back in tremendous
numbers, more than in all of recorded history in many regions such as SE
Alaska nearest to our ocean restoration project location.

Now it
is being reported that everywhere from Alaska to the lower 48, baby
salmon that swam out to sea, instead of mostly starving were treated to a
feast on newly vibrant ocean pastures where once they could neither
thrive nor survive. They grew and grew and before too long they swam
back to our rivers a hundred million strong.

The SE Alaska Pink
catch in the fall of 2013 was a stunning 226.3 million fish. This
when a high number of 50 million fish were expected. Those extra ocean
pasture fed fish came back because their pasture was enjoying the
richest plankton blooms ever, thanks to me a[nd] 11 shipmates and our
work in the summer of 2012. IT JUST WORKS.

In addition to
producing salmon, this extraordinary experiment has yielded a huge
amount of data. Within a few months after the ocean-fertilizing
operation, NASA satellite images taken from orbit showed a powerful
growth of phytoplankton in the waters that received the Haida’s iron. It
is now clear that, as hoped, these did indeed serve as a food source
for zooplankton, which in turn provided nourishment for multitudes of
young salmon, thereby restoring the depleted fishery and providing
abundant food for larger fish and sea mammals. In addition, since those
diatoms that were not eaten went to the bottom, a large amount of carbon
dioxide was sequestered in their calcium carbonate shells.

Native
Americans bringing back the salmon and preserving their way of life,
while combating global warming: One would think that environmentalists
would be very pleased.

One would be very wrong. Far from
receiving applause for their initiative, the Haida and Mr. George have
become the target of rage aimed from every corner of the community
seeking to use global warming as a pretext for curtailing human freedom.

“It
appears to be a blatant violation of two international resolutions,”
Kristina Gjerde, a senior high-seas adviser for the International Union
for Conservation of Nature told the Guardian. “Even the placement of
iron particles into the ocean, whether for carbon sequestration or fish
replenishment, should not take place, unless it is assessed and found to
be legitimate scientific research without commercial motivation. This
does not appear to even have had the guise of legitimate scientific
research.”

Silvia Ribeiro, of the international anti-technology
watchdog ETC Group, also voiced her horror at any development that might
allow humanity to escape from the need for carbon rationing. “It is now
more urgent than ever that governments unequivocally ban such open-air
geoengineering experiments,” she said. “They are a dangerous distraction
providing governments and industry with an excuse to avoid reducing
fossil-fuel emissions.”

Writing in the New York Times in 2012,
Naomi Klein, the author of a forthcoming book on “how the climate crisis
can spur economic and political transformation,” made clear the
antihuman bias underlying the Haida’s critics. Klein reported that while
vacationing on the coast of Canada’s British Columbia, in a place she
had visited for the past 20 years, she was thrilled by the unprecedented
sighting of a group of orcas. At first, “it felt like a miracle.” But
then she was struck by a disturbing thought:

If Mr. George’s
account of the mission is to believed, his actions created an algae
bloom in an area half of the size of Massachusetts that attracted a huge
array of aquatic life, including whales that could be ‘counted by the
score.’ . . . I began to wonder: could it be that the orcas I saw were
on the way to the all you can eat seafood buffet that had descended on
Mr. George’s bloom? The possibility . . . provides a glimpse into the
disturbing repercussions of geoengineering: once we start deliberately
interfering with the earth’s climate systems — whether by dimming the
sun or fertilizing the seas — all natural events can begin to take on an
unnatural tinge. . . . a presence that felt like a miraculous gift
suddenly feels sinister, as if all of nature were being manipulated
behind the scenes.

This is a remarkable passage. Previously,
environmentalists objected to human actions that harmed whales. But now,
human actions that help whales also evoke horror. Clearly, it’s not
about whales at all. It’s about prohibiting human activity, which is
seen as intrinsically evil and therefore in need of constraint
regardless of its content or intent.

The George-Haida experiment
is of world-historical significance. Starting as a few bands of
hunter-gatherers, humanity expanded the food resources afforded by the
land a thousandfold through the development of agriculture. In recent
decades, the bounty from the sea has also been increased through rapid
expansion of aquaculture, which now supplies about half our fish.
Without these advances, our modern global civilization of 7 billion
people would not be possible.

But aquaculture makes use only of
enclosed waters, and commercial fisheries remain limited to the coasts,
upwelling areas, and other small portions of the ocean that have
sufficient nutrients to be naturally productive. The vast majority of
the ocean, and thus the earth, remains a desert. The development of
open-sea mariculture could change this radically, creating vast new food
resources for both humanity and wildlife. Furthermore, just as
increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have accelerated the rate of
plant growth on land (by 14 percent since 1958, according to NASA
satellite data), so increased levels of carbon dioxide in the ocean
could lead to a massive expansion of flourishing sea life, provided that
humans make the missing critical trace elements needed for life
available across the vast expanse of the oceans.

The point
deserves emphasis. The advent of higher carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere has been a great boon for the terrestrial biosphere,
accelerating the rate of growth of both wild and domestic plants and
thereby expanding the food base supporting humans and land animals of
every type. Ignoring this, the carbophobes point to the ocean instead,
saying that increased levels of carbon dioxide not exploited by biology
could lead to acidification. By making the currently barren oceans
fertile, however, mariculture would transform this putative problem into
an extraordinary opportunity.

Which is precisely why those
demanding restraints on carbon emissions and restrictions on fisheries
hate mariculture. They hate it for the same reason those demanding
constraints in the name of allegedly limited energy resources hate
nuclear power. They hate it because it solves a problem they need
unsolved.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

26 April, 2014

To hell with Archimedes! Melting iceberg to cause sea-level rise

The
sheer scientific illiteracy of the story below is hard to beat.
Ever since Archimedes we have known that melting ice does NOT raise the
water level. And note that the breakoff is part of an Antarctic
ice EXPANSION

NASA has reported an iceberg bigger than
Chicago breaking into the ocean off Antarctica. Known as B31, it is one
of the biggest on the planet at 255 square miles (660 sq km) and up to
500 metres thick.

NASA has been monitoring Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier by satellite since a crack was spotted in 2011.

It is feared it could adversely contribute to rising sea levels with the potential to increase water levels by 1.5 metres.

WHOOPS!
I read that a bit hastily. The sea level rise was attributed to
the glacier, not the iceberg. Some headlines did however
say: "A TITANTIC iceberg that broke off a glacier last year is
floating out of control in the Southern Ocean, threatening shipping
lanes and raising sea levels." That was the front page
introduction to this report. So there was indeed journalistic illiteracy at work in the matter

HMMM!
The Pine Island glacier appears to be partly land-based and partly
afloat on Pine Island bay. So when Warmists talk of it breaking
off, it is presumably the floating part they are referring to. And
in that case my initial scorn is fully warranted. The broken off
Pine Island glacier would NOT cause a water rise -- as it is
already afloat.

A low carbon meatball! Good luck with that!

Meat is carbon plus a bit of water and trace elements

The
pursuit of sustainability has led IKEA, the Swedish home-furnishings
company, to develop "lower carbon alternatives" to the traditional
beef-and-pork Swedish meatballs it now sells at its stores.

"IKEA
is a responsible company, and we believe that we can play an important
role in the move towards a more sustainable society," the company
announced on April 22, Earth Day.

"We will continue to sell the
regular meatballs that our customers enjoy every day at IKEA. However we
will also provide lower carbon alternatives; a chicken meatball and a
vegetarian meatball are under development and will complement our
meatball offer in 2015."

Environmentalists hailed the move away
from meat: "This is one of the first times a major retailer has
introduced a meatless menu item explicitly to combat climate change,"
said the Center for Biological Diversity.

The group says most
people don't realize how important it is to reduce meat consumption,
which involves "agricultural emissions," such as methane from animals
passing gas.

The Center for Biological Diversity recently
launched a new campaign urging Americans to “take extinction off your
plate.” Visitors to the website are urged to pledge that they will "eat
less meat" and "save more wildlife."

Is
spring EVER going to arrive on the Great Lakes? Nasa reveals stunning
pictures of Lake Superior still covered in a record-breaking layer of
ice

Hint: Global cooling

Even though
North America is a full month into astronomical spring, the Great Lakes
have been slow to give up on the harsh winter, Nasa has revealed.

The
space agency today published this stunning picture of the Great Lakes,
showing a third of their expanse is still covered in ice.

Lake Superior was found to be the most affected, and was found to be 63.5 percent ice covered on April 20th.

Averaged
across Lake Superior, ice was 22.6 centimeters (8.9 inches) thick; it
was as much as twice that thickness in some locations.

Researcher George Leshkevich said that ice cover this spring is significantly above normal.

For
comparison, Lake Superior had 3.6 percent ice cover on April 20, 2013;
in 2012, ice was completely gone by April 12. In the last winter that
ice cover grew so thick on Lake Superior (2009), it reached 93.7 percent
on March 2 but was down to 6.7 percent by April 21.

Average
water temperatures on all of the Great Lakes have been rising over the
past 30 to 40 years and ice cover has generally been shrinking. (Lake
Superior ice was down about 79 percent since the 1970s.)

But
chilled by persistent polar air masses throughout the 2013-14 winter,
ice cover reached 88.4 percent on February 13 and 92.2 percent on March
6, 2014, the second highest level in four decades of record-keeping.

Air
temperatures in the Great Lakes region were well below normal for
March, and the cool pattern is being reinforced along the coasts because
the water is absorbing less sunlight and warming less than in typical
spring conditions.

Lake Superior ice cover got as high as 95.3
percent on March 19. By April 22, it was reported at 59.9 percent; Lake
Huron was nearly 30.4 percent. News outlets noted that as many as 70
ships have been backed up in Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Erie, waiting
for passage into ports on Lake Superior.

The U.S. Coast Guard has
been grouping ships together into small convoys after they pass through
locks at Sault Ste. Marie, in order to maximize ice-breaking efficiency
and to protect ships from damage.

Lately,
the climate change movement has been celebrating. A recent
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report expressed 95%
confidence that half of the warming during the previous 60 years was
manmade. In January, the EPA ruled that new coal plants must install
carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology — technology that is not yet
commercially viable (take that, climate deniers). Then there is the
accumulation of almost 500 climate-related laws passed in 66 countries.
According to Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), "This surprising legislative
momentum is happening across all continents. Encouragingly, this
progress is being led by the big emerging and developing countries, such
as China and Mexico, that together will represent 8 billion of the
projected 9 billion people on Earth in 2050."

Riding the
new-found momentum, climate change elites have sprung into action,
reinvigorating the war on carbon and climate deniers. President Obama is
conducting a regulatory version of Cap and Trade (legislation that
failed to pass during his first term). He even has his own "Climate
Change Action Plan." Senate Democrats are holding climate talkathons.
John Kerry plans to broker a deal "committing the world’s economies to
significant cuts in carbon emissions and sweeping changes in the global
energy economy." Climate luminary Joe Biden theorizes, "It would be nice
not to have any carbon fuels." To Al Gore, taxing carbon is not enough.
"Tax denial," he chortles.

But, the bravado and
self-congratulatory rhetoric is a veneer, hiding an astounding lack of
planet-saving progress. So too are the pompous slogans and the grandiose
policies, built on a delicate foundation of "settled science," "social
justice," and wishful thinking. They mask an astounding ignorance of
global energy consumption and production trends, not to mention economic
realities. God forbid they are celebrating the progress they expect
from Obama's action plan and Kerry's climate deal. Their schemes offer
nothing new, unless climate scientists discover a way for pompous
slogans to reduce GHG emissions.

A litany of ambitious carbon
reduction promises and sophomoric flat-earther insults is not a measure
of actual planet-saving progress. Nor is a litany of vain and, at best,
nebulous "accomplishments" such as laws passed, treaties discussed,
money spent, solar panels and windmills produced, and green jobs
created. What is the actual effectiveness of the policies? Are we on
track to keep GHG emissions below 450 ppm by 2050 (to avert the "carbon
tsunami" and our fall from the "climate cliff")? How much do we have to
pay developing countries as climate change compensation? How much will
it cost to prevent the catastrophic 7.2-degree Fahrenheit global
temperature increase that some authorities predicted to occur by 2100?
Will these amounts be sufficient to finally save the planet?

One
hopes that what is past is not prologue. The policies of the past 25
years have failed miserably in reducing global GHG emissions. They
include 20 years of generous subsidies for renewable energy and the
splurge of $150 billion in loans to green energy companies such as
Solyndra, Abound Solar, Evergreen Solar, and A123 Systems. The current
European Union plan (EU 20/20), said to be the world's most significant
climate policy, will cost $20 trillion through the end of the century
and would reduce the global temperature by 0.1°F. $20 trillion for a
0.1°F decrease? What about the other 7.1 Armageddon-like degrees?

Perhaps
Obama's Climate Action Plan — constructed with similar haste, method,
and disdain for economic and scientific realities – will be more
effective than the EU 20/20 plan. Whatever he has in mind, it had better
work fast. At the 2007 Climate Change Conference, U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon proclaimed that the world is at a
crossroads, where "one path leads to a comprehensive climate change
agreement, the other to oblivion. The choice is clear." We must choose
soon: "The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push
us past the tipping point." What has been accomplished since? No new
treaties (toothless or otherwise). The Kyoto Protocol, still the world's
only climate change treaty, has actually weakened. Russia, Japan, and
Canada have recently dropped out — despite Obama's 2008 heal-the-planet
speech. The officially designated rescue fuels (solar, wind, and
biofuel) account for less than 2% of the world's energy supply; oil,
gas, and coal account for 87%. GHG emissions are increasing, faster than
ever. Evidently, we opted for oblivion.

According to a recent UN
study, thanks to the abysmal failure of world governments to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, we are probably doomed. English climate change
scientist James Lovelock more than agrees; he believes we're only 40
years from global catastrophe. Unlike American climate gurus, Lovelock
may have noticed the ongoing global energy shift in which developing
countries are expected to consume 65% of the world's energy by 2040. Of
all experts, Mr. Obama should have noticed that the developing world is
hurtling into the future, furiously burning every calorie it can find of
what he calls "yesterday's energy."

As this trend — said to
"foreshadow a climate change catastrophe" — intensifies with the
population growth of developing countries, other climate change experts
warn that the end could come even sooner. Tokyo governor Shintaro
Ishihara speculated, "It could be that the 2016 Games are the last
Olympics in the history of mankind." Holy shit! No wonder Obama doesn't
have time for meetings with the "Flat Earth Society."

This is a
glimpse, from the world of climate change believers, of the
effectiveness of the policies of their revered political leaders:
catastrophe, doom, and oblivion, arriving ahead of schedule. Damn those
flat-earthers.

In the real world, however, most people don't see
the coming climate havoc with such clarity, or any clarity. Among the
reasons for this hazy, infidel view: the temperature trend that produced
the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 began to fade in, well, 1998; global
temperatures have not increased in the 16 years since 1999. But climate
change believers see it; they predicted it — all the horror that, for
decades, they have been attributing to climate change. And they see the
failure. Yet they refuse to see the vivid connection between paltry
emissions reduction and futile policy.

The failure to save the
planet is not the result of insufficiently apocalyptic warnings or
public ridicule directed at uncooperative climate change deniers. Those
who are unaware of the earth's curvature and temperature are irrelevant —
all ten of them. Rather, it is the 6.9 billion people (of the 7 billion
inhabiting the planet), who pay little, if any, attention to the
incessant, shrill, vile, delusional hyperbole of the clueless
climate-change elite. They are too busy dealing with bigger problems.
The vast majority of people in the industrialized world are much more
troubled by economic stagnation, unemployment, and debt. People in the
developing world are consumed by the problems of poverty, famine,
oppression, ignorance, despair, and natural disasters, to name a few —
all the while struggling to be like their industrialized brethren. And
when they become industrialized, they will switch to worrying about
economic stagnation, unemployment, and debt. Only after that will they
worry about climate change. Possibly.

Then there is the
irrational insistence that renewable energy, alone, must save the
planet. It is clear to anyone, except the political ideologues who long
ago hijacked the global warming movement, that solar panels and
windmills are not up to the task. At present, only subsidy and delusion
sustain them. And who else but boneheads with a pie-in-the-sky political
agenda would blithely dismiss more intelligent, proven technologies
(natural gas and nuclear power) that could drastically reduce GHG
emissions. For example, by replacing coal with natural gas, the
shale-energy revolution (not the Obama green revolution) has reduced US
emissions by 300 million tons — an amount that exceeds the world's total
reduction from solar and wind combined — while reducing American energy
costs by $100 billion.

Last September, in Why Climate Activists
Need to Dial Back on the Panic, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg lamented,
"Our climate conversation has been dominated by fear and
end-of-the-world thinking." He recommended that "instead of being scared
silly, we need to realize that global warming is one of many challenges
to tackle during the 21st century and start fixing it now with
low-cost, realistic innovation." Maybe there is hope for the global
warming movement.

Maybe not. Only a few months later, John Kerry
descended upon Indonesia, brandishing global warming as a weapon of mass
destruction (WMD), and promptly accused climate deniers of "burying
their heads in the sand." Kerry, no doubt, thought that punching up his
vapid climate change rhetoric with an edgy WMD metaphor would persuade
Indonesians to turn down their thermostats and pump up their tires.
Except that in Indonesia, where the average annual income is barely
$3,000, most people don't have thermostats and tires.

Kerry also
seemed unaware of the volcano that killed several people just two days
before his arrival, and that Indonesia is located in the "Pacific Ring
of Fire," so named for its deadly and frequent earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions. But there stood the imperious and clueless Kerry, trying to
scare people who live in a "ring of fire" into worrying about a little
carbon-induced warming. Perhaps his "most fearsome weapon of mass
destruction" embellishment will have more success in China, which
accounts for almost 60% of the recent increase in global coal
consumption, or in India, where the average annual income is $984.

For
anyone who is serious about reducing manmade GHG emissions, there is
nothing to celebrate. John Kerry (and his ilk) can offer nothing but
catastrophe, doom, and oblivion to the global warming crusade.

All
over the country, city and regional governments are writing
“sustainability plans,” which are supposedly aimed at reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. While the goal may be laudable, for the most
part these plans won’t significantly reduce emissions. However, they
will certainly impose huge costs on urban residents and taxpayers.

From
Lafayette, La., to the Twin Cities, to the San Francisco Bay area, the
heart of the plans consists of a one-size-fits-all prescription: make
costly transit improvements in major corridors and then subsidize the
construction of high-density housing in those corridors so lots of
people will have access to transit. This prescription not only demands a
huge change in American lifestyles, but also offers no reason to think
it will help save the planet.

The Department of Energy, for
example, has found that multifamily housing actually uses more energy
(and therefore emits more greenhouse gases) per square foot than
single-family homes. The only way multifamily housing would save energy
would be if people accept smaller homes. A better solution is making
single-family homes more energy efficient, which costs less and does not
require the loss of privacy in multifamily housing.

Meanwhile,
data from the Department of Transportation show that transit uses, on
average, about the same amount of energy — and emits about the same
amount of greenhouse gases — per passenger mile as the average car.
Getting people out of their cars and onto transit won’t reduce
emissions, but it will inconvenience a lot of people because transit is
slow, expensive and inflexible.

Even if transit were truly
greener than driving, the transit-plus-density solution doesn’t even
reduce driving. Between 1980 and 2010, San Francisco Bay area population
densities grew by more than 55 percent, and the region built more than
200 miles of rail transit lines and scores of high-density developments
along those lines. Yet per capita transit ridership fell by a third
while per capita driving increased by at least 5 percent.

Moreover,
cars are rapidly becoming more energy efficient. It takes around 10
years (and huge amounts of energy) to plan and build a rail transit
line, but 10 years from today the average car on the road will be at
least 25 percent more fuel-efficient than cars today.

We can do a
lot of things to emissions, but we have to ask whether they are
cost-effective. It won’t do much good to reduce emissions if we bankrupt
ourselves in the process, as our descendants will be too busy trying to
survive to worry about the planet as a whole.

A 2007 report from
McKinsey & Company suggests anything that costs more than about $50
per ton of abated emissions is a waste of money. Even using the
optimistic assumptions built into sustainability plans, the
transit-and-density strategy will cost thousands of dollars per ton —
and it is more likely that it won’t reduce emissions at all.

While
transit and density won’t significantly reduce emissions, it will have
huge effects on cities. It will make traffic more congested and roadways
less safe. It will make housing less affordable and increase other
consumer costs. Besides, the increased tax burden will drive away jobs.

Population
data clearly show that the fastest-growing urban areas are ones that
have kept housing affordable by not using land-use regulation to impose
lifestyle changes on their residents. For example, urban areas in Texas,
which has some of the least restrictive land-use laws, are growing far
faster than in California, which has some of the most restrictive laws.

Data
also show that urban areas that spend more on transit grow more slowly.
Of the nation’s 65 largest urban areas, the ones that spent the most on
transit in the 1990s tended to grow slower in the 2000s than the ones
that spent less. This doesn’t mean regions have to settle for
poor-quality transit: in most places outside of New York City, buses can
move as many people as fast and as comfortably as trains at a far lower
cost.

In short, the transit-plus-density prescription imposes
major costs on cities without significantly saving energy or reducing
emissions. Nor does it cure obesity, end poverty, or bring about world
peace, as some of its advocates seem to believe. Urban leaders need to
be wary of people who propose policies that are anything but
sustainable.

A
new play about climate change opened Thursday in New York that’s
part-thriller, part-musical, part-educational and all-controversial.

It’s backed by Uncle Sam.

The
National Science Foundation, a federal agency, usually funds research
projects. But in a rare move, it gave a nearly $700,000 grant for the
play “The Great Immensity,” a mystery with music and songs that’s
playing at New York’s Public Theater in Manhattan.

The
Brooklyn-based theater company that developed the play, The Civilians,
also received two federal grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts that totaled $65,000.

But the science agency grant, made in
2010, is really bugging Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the chairman of the
House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

“I support NSF
research that can lead to discoveries that change our world, expand our
horizons and save lives,” said Smith. “But spending taxpayer dollars to
fund a climate change musical called ‘The Great Immensity’ sounds more
like an immense waste of taxpayer dollars, money that could have funded
higher priority research.”

Smith highlighted the $697,177 grant
for the play at a congressional hearing this month as one of several
questionable NSF grants, and he’s now pushing legislation that would
require greater financial accountability from the agency.

Climate
change is a term used to describe the extreme weather shifts in the
last 50 years attributed to higher levels of carbon dioxide from the use
of fossil fuels. The tension between Smith, who questions the extent of
climate change, and the play’s proponents underscores the political
divide over global warming.

The play, designed to entertain as
well as educate theater-goers, is “a continent-hopping thriller,”
according to “The Great Immensity” website, that follows a woman who’s
searching for her husband after he disappears from a tropical island
while working for a nature program.

There’s more intrigue as she
discovers a plot that may upend an international climate conference in
Paris. The play covers a lot of ground, from the Panama Canal to the
Arctic Circle.

Written and directed by Steve Cosson with songs by
Michael Friedman, it’s described in a Public Theater release as “a
highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time:
How can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the
enormous environmental challenges that confront us?”

Smith doesn’t see it that way.

While
the Texan is protesting the NSF grant because he thinks the money
should be spent on science research, he’s also skeptical about climate
change.

“Contrary to the claims of those who want to strictly
regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy for
all Americans, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with
climate science,” he wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece last year.

Most
climate scientists think differently. According to NASA, 97 percent of
climate scientists believe that human activity has caused a warming
trend over the past century, and most leading scientific organizations
agree.

The play’s author is in the activist wing of the theater
world. Cosson is the founding artistic director of The Civilians,
founded in 2001, which describes itself as investigative theater.

“The
play takes its name from an enormous Chinese Panamax ship that the
authors observed crossing the Panama Canal,” according to the theater
troupe’s website. The drama was developed with material from interviews
with scientists and indigenous people in Barro Colorado Island in the
Panama Canal and the city of Churchill in arctic Canada.

What was the taxpayer money used for?

“NSF
supported the R&D work early in this project, which includes script
development,” Dana Topousis, the NSF’s acting division director of
public affairs, said in an email. “NSF funding for ‘The Great Immensity’
included the development and finalization of the script during
prototyping/testing, development of materials and multimedia for the
stage production, actors’ salaries during prototype/testing and
development of a website related to the play. NSF funding did not go to
operating expenses or travel.”

The NEA gave $15,000 in 2010 for
development and workshop production of the play and $50,000 in 2012 for
“community engagement” to connect creative artists with the scientific
community.

Environmental groups are supportive of the play; climate change critics support Smith.

“At
The Climate Group, we believe that artistic platforms offer a unique
opportunity to explore and enhance the most urgent issue of our time:
climate change,” said Kirsten Strom , affiliate event coordinator for
the environmental group’s Climate Week NYC. “Theater, music, poetry and
paintings have a catalytic power and one which can really re-energize
citizens.”

Jim Lakely, the director of communications at The
Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative research center,
laughed when told of the federal investment in the play.

“No
public money at all should be going to this frivolity,” he said. “It is
the definition of wasted taxpayer dollars. Besides, it’s not like
there’s a shortage of wealthy climate alarmists in the private sector
who could fund this musical.”

“The Great Immensity” began previews April 11, opened Thursday and concludes its run next Thursday.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

25 April, 2014

An interesting admission

"Nature"
magazine admits that more CO2 is good for plants -- which includes
crops. Skeptics have been saying it for years, of course

Elevated CO2 further lengthens growing season under warming conditions

By Melissa Reyes-Fox et al.

Abstract

Observations
of a longer growing season through earlier plant growth in temperate to
polar regions have been thought to be a response to climate warming1,
2, 3, 4, 5. However, data from experimental warming studies indicate
that many species that initiate leaf growth and flowering earlier also
reach seed maturation and senesce earlier, shortening their active and
reproductive periods6, 7, 8, 9, 10. A conceptual model to explain this
apparent contradiction11, and an analysis of the effect of elevated
CO2—which can delay annual life cycle events12, 13, 14—on changing
season length, have not been tested. Here we show that experimental
warming in a temperate grassland led to a longer growing season through
earlier leaf emergence by the first species to leaf, often a grass, and
constant or delayed senescence by other species that were the last to
senesce, supporting the conceptual model. Elevated CO2 further extended
growing, but not reproductive, season length in the warmed grassland by
conserving water, which enabled most species to remain active longer.
Our results suggest that a longer growing season, especially in years or
biomes where water is a limiting factor, is not due to warming alone,
but also to higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations that extend the active
period of plant annual life cycles.

Australia: It's starfish, not global warming that is damaging the Great Barrier Reef

More
than 250,000 crown-of-thorns starfish have been removed from the Great
Barrier Reef off Queensland in the past two years, Federal Environment
Minister Greg Hunt says.

The pest is considered to be one of the biggest threats to the reef and has traditionally been hard to destroy.

In recent decades, the crown-of-thorns starfish has been responsible for 42 per cent of coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef.

Researchers
are now using a single injection that causes the starfish to break up
between 24 to 48 hours, replacing the previous method requiring up to 20
injections.

The single injection method is harmless to other marine plants and animals.

Mr Hunt says the method has lead to a four-fold increase in the eradication rate.

"We
have provided $1 million now - we have $2 million in the budget going
forward and we believe that this is likely to be an ongoing program," he
said.

"It's necessary for the reef and it's the single best hope
we've had in dealing with the crown-of-thorns since people have been
working in this space."

Mr Hunt says the new method has made a
big difference. "This is a nasty critter - it does damage to the
reef, it does damage to aquatic life," he said. "We can make a
difference - we have saved literally billions of eggs from being
released onto the reef."

Crown-of-thorns cull part of long-term reef plan

The Government's crown-of-thorns eradication plan is a key element of its Reef 2050 Plan.

Divers from the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators can cull over 1,000 crown-of-thorns starfish on a 40-minute dive.

Project
manager Steve Moon says this includes 27,000 in just eight days at
Arlington reef and 9,000 at Batt reef, as well as 14,000 at Spitfire
reef near Cooktown, north of Cairns.

"What we have noticed is a significant increase in coral cover, which is absolutely spectacular," he said.

"That
was the aim of the whole program - to try and give the coral a chance
to grow and we've seen that, despite some of the extreme weather events
that we've had."

Other measures under the Government's Reef 2050
Plan will see improvements to the quality of water entering the reef,
which will limit the ability of larval-stage starfish to thrive on
water-borne algae that results from nutrient-rich waters.

The Government has also funded a second control vessel, Venus 2, as part of the program.

But
Mr Moon says more resources may be needed. "I don’t think we’ve
seen the peak of this current outbreak yet," he said. "I think we’re
going to be looking further down the track somewhere around this time
next year, given that we’ve already had a spawning season in recent
months.

"What we’re going to see - is two boats going to be enough? Possibly, but probably not."

Jairo
Rivera from James Cook University helped to develop the single
injection and says it is working with scientists from the Sunshine Coast
University on a contraceptive to further control the spread of
crown-of-thorns starfish.

"We found a protein on the surface of the sperm and that can be [bound] to a molecule that turns the eggs sterile," he said.

"If we can do that, that will be awesome because one single starfish can produce up to 60 million eggs per year."

Mr Rivera says the new method could be ready to trial in two years but $300,000 is needed to support the research.

Candra
Kolodziej’s concern for the environmental impacts of the meat industry
had her looking for alternative options. Instead of going vegan (the
diet most noted for being environmentally friendly) and searching for
protein sources that do not originate from animals, the 32-year-old came
up with the horrible idea to turn to the pet store for her next meal.
For one meal a day, Kolodziej ate animals that could be found alive and
well at your local pet store, such as mice, minnows, crickets and
mealworms.

Kolodziej claims that she didn’t do this experiment
because she cares about the horrors of factory farming. She says, “At
this point I should note that I’m not some granola here to chew your ear
off about how fucked up factory farming is. In fact, I eat a lot of
meat myself. I’m from northern Michigan, where there’s only one day in
the Christian calendar year when most folks will intentionally choose
fish, and I’m the type of heathen who doesn’t even abstain on that day.
So this little experiment was done for my own sake, to know what sort of
animal-based dishes I can look forward to when hamburgers are enjoyed
exclusively by the one percent.”

Next time, we hope veganism
seems like the best option to protest the environmental impacts of the
meat industry. A good seitan dish can satisfy even the most devout
carnivore.

The
U.S. is stockpiling the most crude since the Great Depression, thanks
to the shale boom that has boosted production to the most in 26 years.

Inventories
rose 3.52 million barrels last week to 397.7 million, the highest level
since 1931, according to Energy Information Administration data going
back to 1920. Crude output climbed 59,000 barrels a day to 8.36 million,
the most since January 1988, as the combination of horizontal drilling
and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, unlocked supplies from shale
formations in the central U.S., including the Bakken in North Dakota and
the Eagle Ford in Texas.

The burgeoning supply has sparked
arguments over whether a 1975 law that prevents most U.S. crude exports
should be repealed. It also may reduce the impetus for a quick approval
of the Keystone XL pipeline moving Canadian crude to the U.S. Average
weekly imports are down 3.7 percent so far this year, compared with the
same period in 2013.

“This paints a secure supply picture for the
U.S.,” said Stephen Schork, president of Schork Group Inc., a
consulting group in Villanova, Pennsylvania. “This will add to the
political debate about exports and Keystone. Whatever issues arise, it’s
important to remember you would rather deal with the problems of a
supply glut rather than a dearth.”

Inventories along the Gulf
Coast, known as PADD 3, rose 2.44 million barrels to 209.6 million last
week, the most in EIA data going back to 1990.

Much of that
inventory is light, sweet crude, or oil with low density and sulfur
content, from the shale fields. Many refineries along the Gulf Coast are
designed to run most efficiently on cheaper heavy, sour barrels
imported from Mexico and Venezuela.

“The problem is that we have a
glut of light, sweet crude when what we need is sour,” Schork said.
“There have to find a way to swap the barrels we’ve got in hand or
exporting them, so we can take full advantage of the rise in output.”

Energy Independence

Harold
Hamm, the chairman and chief executive officer of Continental Resources
Inc. (CLR), who became a billionaire drilling in North Dakota, told
U.S. lawmakers Jan. 30 that the country, which EIA data show supplied 86
percent of its own energy last year, can drill its way to full
independence by 2020. Hamm is leading an effort to get Congress to allow
crude exports for the first time since the 1970s.

Senator Lisa
Murkowski of Alaska, the senior Republican on the Energy and Natural
Resources Committee, said in a Jan. 7 speech that she also supports
changing the export rules.

Imports decreased 475,000 barrels a
day to 7.8 million in the seven days ended April 18. Arrivals have
averaged 7.46 million barrels in 2014, according to EIA figures, down
from 7.74 million for the first 16 weeks of 2013.

Despite
its doubters and haters, the shale revolution in oil and gas production
is here to stay. In the second half of this decade, moreover, it is
likely to spread globally more quickly than most think. And all of that
is, on balance, a good thing for the world.

The recent surge of
U.S. oil and natural gas production has been nothing short of
astonishing. For the past three years, the United States has been the
world’s fastest-growing hydrocarbon producer, and the trend is not
likely to stop anytime soon. U.S. natural gas production has risen by 25
percent since 2010, and the only reason it has temporarily stalled is
that investments are required to facilitate further growth. Having
already outstripped Russia as the world’s largest gas producer, by the
end of the decade, the United States will become one of the world’s
largest gas exporters, fundamentally changing pricing and trade patterns
in global energy markets. U.S. oil production, meanwhile, has grown by
60 percent since 2008, climbing by three million barrels a day to more
than eight million barrels a day. Within a couple of years, it will
exceed its old record level of almost ten million barrels a day as the
United States overtakes Russia and Saudi Arabia and becomes the world’s
largest oil producer. And U.S. production of natural gas liquids, such
as propane and butane, has already grown by one million barrels per day
and should grow by another million soon.

What is unfolding in
reaction is nothing less than a paradigm shift in thinking about
hydrocarbons. A decade ago, there was a near-global consensus that U.S.
(and, for that matter, non-OPEC) production was in inexorable decline.
Today, most serious analysts are confident that it will continue to
grow. The growth is occurring, to boot, at a time when U.S. oil
consumption is falling. (Forget peak oil production; given a combination
of efficiency gains, environmental concerns, and substitution by
natural gas, what is foreseeable is peak oil demand.) And to cap things
off, the costs of finding and producing oil and gas in shale and tight
rock formations are steadily going down and will drop even more in the
years to come.

The evidence from what has been happening is now
overwhelming. Efficiency gains in the shale sector have been large and
accelerating and are now hovering at around 25 percent per year, meaning
that increases in capital expenditures are triggering even more
potential production growth. It is clear that vast amounts of
hydrocarbons have migrated from their original source rock and become
trapped in shale and tight rock, and the extent of these rock
formations, like the extent of the original source rock, is enormous --
containing resources far in excess of total global conventional proven
oil reserves, which are 1.5 trillion barrels. And there are already
signs that the technology involved in extracting these resources is
transferable outside the United States, so that its international spread
is inevitable.

In short, it now looks as though the first few
decades of the twenty-first century will see an extension of the trend
that has persisted for the past few millennia: the availability of
plentiful energy at ever-lower cost and with ever-greater efficiency,
enabling major advances in global economic growth.

WHY THE PAST IS PROLOGUE

The
shale revolution has been very much a “made in America” phenomenon. In
no other country can landowners also own mineral rights. In only a few
other countries (such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom) is
there a tradition of an energy sector featuring many independent
entrepreneurial companies, as opposed to a few major companies or
national champions. And in still fewer countries are there capital
markets able and willing to support financially risky exploration and
production.

This powerful combination of indigenous factors will
continue to drive U.S. efforts. A further 30 percent increase in U.S.
natural gas production is plausible before 2020, and from then on, it
should be possible to maintain a constant or even higher level of
production for decades to come. As for oil, given the research and
development now under way, it is likely that U.S. production could rise
to 12 million barrels per day or more in a few years and be sustained
there for a long time. (And that figure does not include additional
potential output from deep-water drilling, which is also seeing a
renaissance in investment.)

Two factors, meanwhile, should bring
prices down for a long time to come. The first is declining production
costs, a consequence of efficiency gains from the application of new and
growing technologies. And the second is the spread of shale gas and
tight oil production globally. Together, these suggest a sustainable
price of around $5.50 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas in the
United States and a trading range of $70–$90 per barrel for oil globally
by the end of this decade.

These trends will provide a
significant boost to the U.S. economy. Households could save close to
$30 billion annually in electricity costs by 2020, compared to the U.S.
Energy Information Administration’s current forecast. Gasoline costs
could fall from an average of five percent to three percent of real
disposable personal income. The price of gasoline could drop by 30
percent, increasing annual disposable income by $750, on average, per
driving household. The oil and gas boom could add about 2.8 percent in
cumulative GDP growth by 2020 and bolster employment by some three
million jobs.

Beyond the United States, the spread of shale gas
and tight oil exploitation should have geopolitically profound
implications. There is no longer any doubt about the sheer abundance of
this new accessible resource base, and that recognition is leading many
governments to accelerate the delineation and development of
commercially available resources. Countries’ motivations are diverse and
clear. For Saudi Arabia, which is already developing its first power
plant using indigenous shale gas, the exploitation of its shale
resources can free up more oil for exports, increasing revenues for the
country as a whole. For Russia, with an estimated 75 billion barrels of
recoverable tight oil (50 percent more than the United States),
production growth spells more government revenue. And for a host of
other countries, the motivations range from reducing dependence on
imports to increasing export earnings to enabling domestic economic
development.

Fracking
could generate a £33bn investment windfall in Britain thanks to the
creation of a new industrial supply chain, a report has claimed.

Drilling
of an estimated 4,000 horizontal shale gas wells over an 18-year period
would generate 64,000 new jobs and spur massive investment to serve the
industry, according to the UK Onshore Operators Group.

Of the
£33bn of investment identified within the report, the production of
specialised equipment such as pumps trucks and other oil field services
needed for hydraulic fracturing will require £17bn of investment.

In
addition, the study highlights the need for 50 new land-based drilling
rigs to meet the industry’s demand along with the fabrication of 8,000
miles of steel casing and £4.1bn of investment into other services such
as transportation.

“We are building an industry in this country
which will not only potentially give the UK energy security, and make a
big contribution in tax revenues, but will also bring immense benefits
to other industries and create sustainable, well-paid jobs,” said Ken
Cronin, chief executive of the oil industry body.

However, the
development of fracking in the UK has so far proved controversial,
despite its potential to safeguard energy security. Most of these
concerns centre around the disruption that could be caused by drilling
in rural communities and fears over the possible environmental
consequences of the fracking process.

Business has broadly
welcomed the findings of the study, which, based on comparisons from the
US fracking experience, has outlined the potential scale of the new
market for British oil and gas services industries.

Deirdre Fox,
Tata Steel’s director of strategic business development in the UK, said
the report was an “eye-opener as to how big an opportunity the
responsible development of a shale gas industry is for the UK economy”.

Part
of the push for shale gas comes from the UK’s growing dependence on
foreign energy since North Sea supplies started to slow. By 2020 it is
estimated that 70pc of the UK’s gas will come from overseas. Wholesale
gas prices, which have climbed about 120pc since 2005. However, in the
US, fracking has helped to reduce the cost of energy over the same
period.

In a further boost for the industry, Ed Davey, Energy
Secretary, confirmed that the Government is looking at changing trespass
laws to give companies the right to carry out fracking under private
land.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

24 April, 2014

"We do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle"

This
letter was sent by Steven Landsburg, professor of economics at the
University of Rochester and the author of several popular books on the
subject, to his daughter's teacher. It concerns the school's attempts to
indoctrinate the girl in environmentalism. The letter forms part of an
article by Landsburg in which he discusses the need for pluralism and
respect for those with different views, noting how these
environmentalists seem to fail on both counts.

Dear Rebecca:

When
we lived in Colorado, Cayley was the only Jewish child in her class.
There were also a few Moslems. Occasionally, and especially around
Christmas time, the teachers forgot about this diversity and made
remarks that were appropriate only for the Christian children. These
remarks came rarely, and were easily counteracted at home with
explanations that different people believe different things, so we chose
not to say anything at first. We changed our minds when we overheard a
teacher telling a group of children that if Santa didn't come to your
house, it meant you were a very bad child; this was within earshot of an
Islamic child who certainly was not going to get a visit from Santa. At
that point, we decided to share our concerns with the teachers. They
were genuinely apologetic and there were no more incidents. I have no
doubt that the teachers were good and honest people who had no intent to
indoctrinate, only a certain naïveté derived from a provincial
upbringing.

Perhaps that same sort of honest naïveté is what
underlies the problems we've had at the JCC this year. Just as Cayley's
teachers in Colorado were honestly oblivious to the fact that there is
diversity in religion, it may be that her teachers at the JCC have been
honestly oblivious that there is diversity in politics.

Let me
then make that diversity clear. We are not environmentalists. We
ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmentalism a form
of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the War on Drugs. We
do not recycle. We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that
people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to
recycle, are intruding on her rights.

The preceding paragraph is
intended to serve the same purpose as announcing to Cayley's Colorado
teachers that we are not Christians. Some of them had never been aware
of knowing anybody who was not a Christian, but they adjusted pretty
quickly.

Once the Colorado teachers understood that we and a few
other families did not subscribe to the beliefs that they were
propagating, they instantly apologized and stopped. Nobody asked me what
exactly it was about Christianity that I disagreed with; they simply
recognized that they were unlikely to change our views on the subject,
and certainly had no business inculcating our child with opposite views.

I
contrast this with your reaction when I confronted you at the preschool
graduation. You wanted to know my specific disagreements with what you
had taught my child to say. I reject your right to ask that question.
The entire program of environmentalism is as foreign to us as the
doctrine of Christianity. I was not about to engage in detailed
theological debate with Cayley's Colorado teachers and they would not
have had the audacity to ask me to. I simply asked them to lay off the
subject completely, they recognized the legitimacy of the request, and
the subject was closed.

I view the current situation as far more
serious than what we encountered in Colorado for several reasons. First,
in Colorado we were dealing with a few isolated remarks here and there,
whereas at the JCC we have been dealing with a systematic attempt to
inculcate a doctrine and to quite literally put words in children's
mouths. Second, I do not sense on your part any acknowledgment that
there may be people in the world who do not share your views. Third, I
am frankly a lot more worried about my daughter's becoming an
environmentalist than about her becoming a Christian. Fourth, we face no
current threat of having Christianity imposed on us by petty tyrants;
the same can not be said of environmentalism. My county government never
tried to send me a New Testament, but it did send me a recycling bin.

Although
I have vowed not to get into a discussion on the issues, let me respond
to the one question you seemed to think was very important in our
discussion: Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The
answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes
them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit
contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities"
are almost always up to no good. I tell my daughter to be wary of such
people — even when they are preschool teachers who have otherwise earned
a lot of love.

Yesterday
was Earth Day, a celebration of our planet and all of its natural
splendor. There's a problem, though, with this conception of
environmentalism, which, like Earth Day, was invented in the 1970s. And
it's a big one: there is literally no such thing as “nature” anymore.

As Christopher Mims wrote for Motherboard a couple years ago, the natural world—independent of us—simply no longer exists.

[A]ny
attempt to talk about the 21st century without acknowledging that every
living thing on the planet will be altered by humans is intellectually
bankrupt. There is no “nature” left — only the portion of nature that we
allow to live because we imagine it serves some purpose — as a thing to
eat, a place to reprocess our waste, or an idea that fulfills our
dwindling desire to maintain “the natural” for aesthetic or ideological
reasons.

Whether bulldozed or clear-cut, fished, farmed or warmed
by greenhouse gases, every ecosystem on Earth is currently being shaped
by humans and human technology. That's true now, and it's been true—to
an ever-increasing extent—for thousands of years. At this point,
believing that it's possible to restore a place to its original state by
removing a dam, restoring a marsh or culling some deer requires a naïve
interpretation of how ecosystems work.

In his assessment, Mims
noted that the ecosystems of the future will not consist of the world,
plus us, plus our technology. Rather, the global ecosystem will
increasingly be guided, shaped and supported by us and our technology.
This shift can already been seen in humanity's most prominent
constructions: cities.

Writing for the Design Observer, Peter
Del Tredici, a botanist and author, explores how cities are giving rise
to novel growing conditions, and new, wholly anthropogenic ecosystems.
Instead of rivers, marshes or forests, Earth now has chain-link fences,
abandoned lots, highway medians and cracks in the pavement. These aren't
devoid of life; they are new human-made ecosystems, and different types
of life—what Del Tredici calls “spontaneous urban vegetation”—thrive in
those environments.

Most people have a different word for
"spontaneous urban vegetaition"—weeds. But these urban plants, Del
Tredici says, are the symptom of change, not the cause. Instead of
blaming weeds for existing and trying to restore a place to its original
state, engineers working in ecological restoration focus on restoring
“ecosystem services." These are jobs that keep an ecosystem working, and
getting those positions filled is what matters most—something needs to
keep the soil from being washed out by the rain (even if it is a
"weed").

So, here's Del Tredici's idea: Instead of longing for
some more “natural” ecosystem that is long-since lost, we should work
with these new species to design ecosystems that are both functional and
aesthetically pleasing. Rather than trying to fight the infiltration of
plants in cracks and vines on fences, we can acknowledge and embrace
the changes we've wrought.

Local
residents will get new powers to block all new onshore wind farms
within six months of a new Conservative government taking office, the
party will promise on Thursday.

No subsidies will paid to
operators of new onshore wind turbines if the Conservatives win a
Commons majority next May, they will promise.

The commitment to
stop the erection of new onshore turbines – revealed in The Telegraph
earlier this month – is the latest hardening of Conservative rhetoric on
green energy.

Subsidies for existing onshore wind would remain
in place and wind farms currently under construction or given legal
consent would still be completed, almost doubling the onshore wind
sector’s capacity by 2020.

But no more onshore turbines would be put in place beyond that, Michael Fallon, the energy minister, will say.

Under
current planning rules, big onshore wind farms are handled by a
national infrastructure regime that can ignore the wishes of local
people.

The Tories would change those rules so that major sites
would be processed by local councils, allowing local politicians to
reflect the views of residents.

Planning policies would also be altered to give greater weight to local concerns about landscape and heritage.

If
the Conservatives win the election next year, they would put new curbs
on wind farms in place by November 2015, Mr Fallon said. The UK has
“enough” onshore turbines he said.

“We remain committed to
cutting our carbon emissions. And renewable energy, including onshore
wind, has a key role in our future energy supply. But we now have enough
bill payer-funded onshore wind in the pipeline to meet our renewable
energy commitments and there’s no requirement for any more.

“That’s why the next Conservative Government will end any additional bill payer subsidy for onshore wind.”

Disney
opened their annual Earth Day movie homage, Pinterest made available a
slew of Earth Day activities for kids, and public and private schools
have had their requisite ceremonies.

In all the celebration, the
one thing that is seemingly never asked is whether or not
environmentalist policies by the government are actually helping the
environment?

Wind energy is just one example. The United
States government has provided billions of dollars of subsidies to the
wind industry over the past twenty years, subsidies that have not yet
been renewed in 2014 as the mature industry is being forced to stand on
its own.

While wind might seem to be the ultimate renewable, the
reality is that the giant windmill turbines that dominate some of the
most scenic landscapes in America both destroy the aesthetic beauty of
the land, while also having a devastating impact on the birds and bats
of the area.

It is estimated that as many as 900,000 bats each
year are killed by the giant wind turbines, a real boon for the insect
populations which are naturally kept in check by these flying
mammals. Diminished bat populations means that farmers are likely
to use more pesticides to keep the crop destroying bugs under control —
now that’s an earth friendly solution.

On the bird front, the
Obama Administration has given a bald eagle license to kill permit to
the wind energy industry for the next thirty years, while at the same
time using the formerly endangered bald eagle as the excuse for moving
against lead ammunition. The rationale is simple — killing bald
eagles on the altar of renewable energy is good — but lead ammunition is
bad because it could end up in game that is wounded, and an eagle might
eat that animal that dies later and get sick from that exposure.
Make sense? I thought not.

Right now, in celebration of
Earth Day, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has embarked on a carbon
dioxide emission spree touting the dangers of global warming as she jets
between cities on a five day tour. The promotion travel includes
such environmental policy staples as McCarthy throwing out the first
pitch at a Red Sox-Yankees game in her home town of Boston.

Following
the game, it is rumored that McCarthy plans to take a selfie with David
Ortiz to increase her social media product placement ranking, thus
enhancing her position as Obama’s leading eco-warrior over the usurping
Secretary of State John Kerry who longs for the title.
Unfortunately, unidentified sources within the environmentalist
community claim that John Kerry was not available for comment as he was
busy again moving his yacht to Rhode Island to avoid taxes.

For
all of those who are confused about what environmentalists mean when
they say Earth Day, let this next example make it clear.
South Korea which burns coal to fuel its electricity craves U.S. coal at
least partially due to its lower sulfur content which leads to less air
pollution. Western state coal producers want to sell their
product to the South Koreans. So what is the problem?
Environmentalists in the state of Washington are blocking the
construction of a coal terminal to transport the more environmentally
friendly American product overseas, all under the guise of protecting
the planet.

Using specious arguments that coal trains will cause
their streets to be covered in coal dust, and even claiming possible
black lung disease ramifications for those living close to the railroad
tracks, the supposedly educated people of Seattle and surrounding areas
are doing everything in their power to block the terminal.

Earth
Day really only means, our part of the Earth Day— as environmentalists
across the nation engage in standard Not In My Back Yard political and
legal tactics to the detriment of the world’s environmental health.

That’s
why environmentalists can at the same time as they oppose the rail
transport of coal, also oppose building the carbon friendly Keystone XL
pipeline to transport Canadian oil to market in the lower 48. When
it comes to Canadian oil, they prefer that the oil be shipped using a
steady stream of less environmentally friendly rail cars than flowing
through a pipeline.

Apparently, for Canadian oil rail is the environmentally approved method of transportation, but for coal, rail is wrong.

Every
Earth Day, the nation is asked to check its thinking caps at the door
in celebration of the environment, and that is fine. But on the
day after Earth Day, critical thinking needs to be re-engaged and when
put under the microscope, many environmental schemes do more harm to the
environment than the ill they purport to try to cure.

Perhaps
this year, Americans will take the blinders off and scrutinize the
impacts of extreme environmental policies and the multi-billion industry
that pushes them. That’s the kind of environmental impact report
that I would look forward to reading.

With
the growing story coming out of Ukraine, the ongoing search for the
missing Malaysian jet, the intensifying Nevada cattle battle, and the
new announcement about the additional Keystone pipeline delay, little
attention is being paid to the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind
energy — or any of the other fifty lapsed tax breaks the Senate Finance
Committee approved earlier this month. But, despite the low news
profile, the gears of government continue to grind up taxpayer dollars.

The
Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency Act (EXPIRE) did
not originally include the PTC, however, prior to the committee markup
hearing on April 3, Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA), Michael Bennet
(D-CO), and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) pushed for an amendment to add a
two-year PTC extension. The tax extender package passed out of committee
and has been sent to the senate floor for debate. There, its future is
uncertain.

“If the bill becomes law,” reports the Energy
Collective, “it will allow wind energy developers to qualify for tax
credits if they begin construction by the end of 2015.” The American
Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) website calls on Congress to: “act
quickly to retroactively extend the PTC.”

The PTC is often the
deciding factor in determining whether or not to build a wind farm.
According to Bloomberg, wind power advocates fear: “Without the
restoration of the subsidies, worth $23 per megawatt hour to turbine
owners, the industry might not recover, and the U.S. may lose ground in
its race to reduce dependence on fossil fuels driving global warming.”
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory released a report earlier this
month affirming the importance of the subsidies to the wind industry. It
showed that the PTC has been critical to the development of the U.S.
wind power industry. The report also found: PTC “extension options that
would ramp down by the end of 2022 appear to be insufficient to support
recent levels of deployment. …extending the production tax credit at its
historical level could provide the best opportunity to sustain strong
U.S. wind energy installation and domestic manufacturing.”

The
PTC was originally part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. It has expired
many times — most recently at the close of 2013. The last-minute 2012
extension, as a part of the American Tax Relief Act, included an
eligibility criteria adjustment that allows projects that began
construction in 2013, and maintain construction through as long as 2016,
to qualify for the ten-year tax credit designed to establish a
production incentive. Previously, projects would have had to be
producing electricity at the time the PTC expired to qualify.

Thomas
Pyle, the president of the American Energy Alliance, which represents
the interests of oil, coal, and natural gas companies, called the 2013
expiration of the wind PTC “a victory for taxpayers.” He explained: “The
notion that the wind industry is an infant that needs the PTC to get on
its feet is simply not true. The PTC has overstayed its welcome and any
attempt to extend it would do a great disservice to the American
people.”

As recently as 2006-2007, “the wind PTC had no natural
enemies,” states a new report on the PTC’s future. The Declining
Appetite for the Wind PTC report points to the assumption that “all
extenders are extended eventually, and that enacting the extension is
purely a matter of routine, in which gridlock on unrelated topics is the
only source of uncertainty and delay.” The report then concludes: “That
has been a correct view in past years.”

The report predicts that
the PTC will follow “the same political trajectory as the ethanol
mandate and the ethanol blenders’ tax credit before it.” The mandate
remains — albeit in a slightly weakened state — and the tax credit is
gone: “ethanol no longer needed the blenders’ tax credit because it had
the strong support of a mandate (an implicit subsidy) behind it.”

The
PTC once enjoyed support from some in the utility industry that needed
it to bolster wind power development to meet the mandates. Today,
utilities have met their state mandates — or come close enough, the
report points out: “their state utility commissioners will not allow
them to build more.” It is important to realize that the commissioners
are appointed or elected to protect the ratepayers and insure that the
rates charged by the utilities are fair and as low as possible. Because
of the increased cost of wind energy over conventional sources,
commissioners won’t allow any more than is necessary to meet the
mandates passed by the legislatures.

The abundance of natural gas
and subsequent low price has also hurt wind energy’s predicted price
parity. South Dakota’s Governor Dennis Daugaard (R), in Bloomberg, said:
“If gas prices weren’t so cheap, then wind might be able to compete on
its own.” David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG Energy Inc. —
which builds both gas and renewable power plants — agrees: “Cheap gas
has definitely made it harder to compete.” With the subsidy, companies
were able to propose wind projects “below the price of gas.” Without the
PTC, Stephen Munro, an analyst at New Energy Finance, confirms: “we
don’t expect wind to be at cost parity with gas.”

The changing
conditions combined with “wide agreement that the majority of extenders
are special interest handouts, the pet political projects of a few
influential members of Congress,” mean that “the wind PTC is not a sure
bet for extension.” Bloomberg declares: “Wind power in the U.S. is on a
respirator.” Mike Krancer, who previously served as secretary of the
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, in an article in
Roll Call, states: “Washington’s usual handout to keep the turbines
spinning may be harder to win this time around.”

Despite the
claim of “Loud support for the PTC” from North American Windpower (NAW),
the report predicts “political resistance.” NAW points to letters from
144 members of Congress urging colleagues to “act quickly to revive the
incentives.” Twenty-six Senate members signed the letter to Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) and 118 signed a similar
letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). However, of the 118 House
members, only six were Republicans — which, even if the PTC extension
makes it out of the Senate, points to the difficulty of getting it
extended in the Republican-controlled House.

Bloomberg cites AWEA
as saying: “the Republican-led House of Representatives may not support
efforts to extend the tax credits before the November election.” This
supports the view stated in the report. House Ways & Means Committee
Chairman David Camp (R-MI) held his first hearing on tax extenders on
April 8. He only wants two of the 55 tax breaks continued: small
business depreciation and the R & D tax credit. The report states:
“Camp says that he will probably hold hearings on which extenders should
be permanent through the spring and into the summer. He hasn’t said
when he would do an extenders proposal himself, but our guess is that he
will wait until after the fall elections. …We think the PTC is most
endangered if Republicans win a Senate Majority in the fall.”

So,
even if the PTC survives the current Senate’s floor debate (Senator Pat
Toomey [R-PA] offered an amendment that would have entirely done away
with the PTC), it is only the “first step in a long journey” and,
according to David Burton, a partner at law firm Akin Gump Hauer and
Feld, is “unlikely on its own to create enough confidence to spur
investment in the development of new projects.” Plus, the House will
likely hold up its resurrection.

Not to mention the growing
opposition to wind energy due to the slaughter of birds and bats —
including the protected bald and golden eagles. Or, growing fears about
health impacts, maintenance costs and abandoned turbines.

All of
these factors have likely led Jeff Imelt, chief executive officer of
General Electric Co. — the biggest U.S. turbine supplier — to recently
state: “We’re planning for a world that’s unsubsidized. Renewables have
to find a way to get to the grid unsubsidized.”

Earth
Day is a chance to take stock: What is the state of the world’s
environment? Our knee-jerk reaction is that it’s getting worse. But that
is not only mostly incorrect, it also prevents us from using Earth Day
to help do the most good to make the environment even better.

Many
think the biggest global environment problem is global warming. After
all, the issue gets the lion’s share of headlines and accounts for much
of the hell-in-a-hand-basket environmental news we come across. But by
any reasonable measure, this is entirely wrong. The most important is in
fact indoor air pollution.

One-third of the world’s people — 2.9
billion — cook and keep warm burning twigs and dung, which give off
deadly fumes. This leads to strokes, heart disease and cancer, and
disproportionately affects women and children. The World Health
Organization estimates that it killed 4.3 million people in 2012. Add
the smaller death count from outdoor pollution, and air pollution causes
one in eight deaths worldwide.

Compare these numbers to global
warming. As the new report from the UN Climate Panel concludes, “At
present the worldwide burden of human ill-health from climate change is
relatively small compared with effects of other stressors.” Air
pollution doesn’t garner the headlines afforded to global warming
because it’s not nearly as sexy. It’s old-fashioned, boring, and doesn’t
raise anywhere near as much money as climate change.

Global
warming is a real problem, but its threat is much, much lower. Estimates
from the World Health Organization and others show that between 50 and
250 times more people die from the effects of air pollution.

That
is why we can confidently say that the environment is doing much better
now than before. Measured on the by-far-most important environmental
indicator, air pollution, the risk of death has dropped dramatically and
consistently, both in the developed and developing world.

With
outdoor air pollution rampant in Beijing that may seem surprising, but
we forget that indoor air pollution has always been much, much more
important. In 1900 almost all pollution deaths in developing countries
came from indoor air pollution — and the individual risk of dying from
all air pollution was more than five-fold higher than it is today.

Even
today, as outdoor air pollution has increased death risks both because
of a higher urban population and more emissions, the death risks from
indoor air pollution still outweigh outdoor 2-to-1, and indoor risks
have been dropping much faster.

This is essentially because of ever more people coming out of poverty, and being able to afford not to cook with dung.

In
the rich world, most other environmental indicators have improved
dramatically. All developed countries have slashed their outdoor air
pollution and handled much of their water pollution, while even strongly
regulating small risks like pesticides and other chemical fears. In the
developed world, rivers just don’t catch fire as the Cuyahoga River did
just before the first Earth Day.

In the developing world, the
overall environment has also gotten better because of the dramatic drop
in indoor air pollution. Outdoor air pollution has risen — but this only
confirms a long-standing finding that some environmental indicators
tend to first get worse, then better, with economic development.

Essentially,
poor countries are trading off economic development for outdoor air
pollution. This prosperity buys food, education and vaccines for their
kids, while electricity eradicates indoor air pollution. And as they get
richer, they can also afford to protect more nature and cut pollution.
In some of the richest developing countries, such as Chile and Mexico,
outdoor air pollution is now declining.

But we still don’t tackle
global warming. That is why many Earth Day messages will ignore the
pervasive evidence for progress and emphasize deterioration and
collapse. The assumption seems to be that a little extra doom and gloom
will help mobilize more attention to improve the environment.

Yet
shrill messaging simply reinforces panic, which impedes our ability to
make smart choices. To tackle the world’s biggest environmental problem,
indoor air pollution, we need to help the world’s 1.2 billion stuck in
abject poverty.

In just three decades, China has lifted 680
million people out of poverty. It did so not with solar panels or wind
turbines, but through a dramatic rise in access to modern energy, mostly
powered by coal.

Panic only brings expensive, inefficient
global-warming policies, like solar and wind. These cost $60 billion in
subsidies but provide less than 1 percent of global energy. At best,
they’ll provide just 3.5 percent in a generation’s time.

Instead
we should invest much more resources in research to innovate the next
generations of green energy. If we can eventually make green
technologies cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch. This means
dramatically lower carbon emissions while providing power for
development to billions of poor.

This Earth Day, we should
celebrate our success so far: Overall, we’ve solved more problems than
we’ve created. Rather than give in to panic, let’s get our priorities
right.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

23 April, 2014

Frustrated Greenie calls for a Fascist uprising

He
forgets that Fascism was popular -- with the appeals of both
nationalism and socialism behind it. How popular would a movement
that does its best to smash all modern life be?

Fuck Earth Day.

No,
really. Fuck Earth Day. Not the first one, forty-four years ago, the
one of sepia-hued nostalgia, but everything the day has since come to
be: the darkest, cruelest, most brutally self-satirizing spectacle of
the year.

Fuck it. Let it end here.

End the dishonesty,
the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your children. Stop
pretending that the crisis can be “solved,” that the planet can be
“saved,” that business more-or-less as usual—what progressives and
environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more—is
morally or intellectually tenable. Let go of the pretense that
“environmentalism” as we know it—virtuous green consumerism, affluent
low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand conservationism, feel-good
greenwashed capitalism—comes anywhere near the radical response our
situation requires.

So, yeah, I’ve had it with Earth Day—and the culture of progressive green denial it represents.

Let
me tell you who I am: I’m a human being. I’m the father of two young
children, a 14-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, who face a
deeply uncertain future on this planet. I’m a husband, a son, a
brother—and a citizen. And, yes, I’m a journalist, and I’m an activist.
And like more and more of us who are fighting for climate justice, I am
engaged in a struggle—a struggle—for the fate of humanity and of life on
Earth. Not a polite debate around the dinner table, or in a classroom,
or an editorial meeting—or an Earth Day picnic. I’m talking about a
struggle. A struggle for justice on a global scale. A struggle for human
dignity and human rights for my fellow human beings, beginning with the
poorest and most vulnerable, far and near. A struggle for my own
children’s future—but not only my children, all of our children,
everywhere. A life-and-death struggle for the survival of all that I
love. Because that is what the climate fight and the fight for climate
justice is. That’s what it is.

Because, I’m sorry, this is not a
test. This is really happening. The Arctic and the glaciers are melting.
The great forests are dying and burning. The oceans are rising and
acidifying. The storms, the floods—the droughts and heat waves—are
intensifying. The breadbaskets are parched and drying. And all of it
faster and sooner than scientists predicted. The window in which to act
is closing before our eyes.

Any discussion of the situation must
begin by acknowledging the science and the sheer lateness of the
hour—that the chance for any smooth, gradual transition has passed, that
without radical change the kind of livable and just future we all want
is simply inconceivable. The international community has, of course,
committed to keeping the global temperature from rising more than two
degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above the preindustrial average—the level, we’re
told, at which “catastrophic” warming can still be avoided (we’ve
already raised it almost one degree, with still more “baked in” within
coming decades). But there’s good reason to believe that a rise of two
degrees will lead to catastrophic consequences. And of course, what’s
“catastrophic” depends on where you live, and how poor you are, and more
often than not the color of your skin. If you’re one of the billions of
people who live in the poorest and most vulnerable places—from
Bangladesh to Louisiana—even 1 degree can mean catastrophe.

But
the world’s climate scientists and leading energy experts are telling us
that unless the major economies drastically and immediately change
course—leaving all but a small fraction of fossil fuel reserves in the
ground over the next four decades—we are headed for a temperature rise
of four or five or even six degrees C within this century. The World
Bank has warned that four degrees “must be avoided.” But we’re not
avoiding it. Global emissions are still rising each year. We’re plunging
headlong toward the worst-case scenarios—critical global food and water
shortages, rapid sea-level rise, social upheaval—and beyond.

The
question is not whether we’re going to “stop” global warming, or
“solve” the climate crisis; it is whether humanity will act quickly and
decisively enough now to save civilization itself—in any form worth
saving. Whether any kind of stable, humane and just future—any kind of
just society—is still possible.

We know that if the governments
of the world actually wanted to address this situation in a serious way,
they could. Indeed, a select few, such as Germany, have begun to do so.
It can be done—and at relatively low cost. And yet the fossil-fuel
industry, and those who do its bidding, have been engaged in a
successful decades-long effort to sow confusion, doubt and
opposition—and to obstruct any serious policies that might slow the
warming, or their profits, and buy us time.

As I’ve said
elsewhere, let’s be clear about what this means: at this late date,
given what we know and have known for decades, to willfully obstruct any
serious response to global warming is to knowingly allow entire
countries and cultures to disappear. It is to rob the poorest and most
vulnerable people on the planet of their land, their homes, their
livelihoods, even their lives and their children’s lives—and their
children’s children’s lives. For money. For political power.

These are crimes. They are crimes against the Earth, and they are crimes against humanity.

What,
are you shocked? The same industry, the same people committing these
crimes—while we subsidize them for their trouble—have been getting away
with murder along the fence lines and front lines for generations.

Fuck
that. The cooler heads have not prevailed. It’s been a
quarter-century since the alarm was sounded. The cooler heads have
failed.

You want sweet, cool-headed reason? How about this?
Masses of people—most of them young, a generation with little or
nothing to lose—physically, nonviolently disrupting the fossil-fuel
industry and the institutions that support it and abet it. Getting in
the way of business as usual. Forcing the issue. Finally acting as
though we accept what the science is telling us.

Um, isn’t that a
bit extreme? you ask. Really? You want extreme? Business as usual
is extreme. Just ask a climate scientist. The building is burning. The
innocents—the poor, the oppressed, the children, your own children—are
inside. And the American petro state is spraying fuel, not water, on the
flames. That’s more than extreme. It’s homicidal. It’s psychopathic.
It’s fucking insane.

Coming to grips with the climate crisis is
hard. A friend of mine says it’s like walking around with a knife in
your chest. I couldn’t agree more.

So I ask again, in the face of
this situation, how does one respond? Many of us, rather than retreat
into various forms of denial and fatalism, have reached the conclusion
that something more than “environmentalism” is called for, and that a
new kind of movement is the only option. That the only thing, at this
late hour, offering any chance of averting an unthinkable future—and of
getting through the crisis that’s already upon us—is the kind of radical
social and political movement that has altered the course of history in
the past. A movement far less like contemporary environmentalism and
far more like the radical human rights, social justice and liberation
struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Does that sound hopelessly naïve to you? Trust me, I get it. I know. I know how it sounds.

And
yet here I am. Because I also know that abolishing slavery sounded
hopeless and naïve in 1857, when Frederick Douglass spoke of struggle.

What
I’m talking about is not a fight to “solve the climate crisis.” That’s
not possible anymore. But neither is it simply a fight for human
survival—because there are oppressive and dystopian forms of survival,
not to mention narcissistic ones, that aren’t worth fighting for.

What
I’m talking about is both a fight for survival and a fight for
justice—for even the possibility of justice. It’s a fight that
transcends environmentalism. It requires something of us beyond the
usual politics and proposals, the usual pieties. It requires the kind of
commitment you find in radical movements—the kind of struggles, from
abolition to women’s, labor and civil rights, that have made possible
what was previously unimaginable.

Because our global crisis—not
merely environmental but moral and spiritual—is fundamental: it strikes
to the root of who we are. It’s a radical situation, requiring a radical
response. Not merely radical in the sense of ideology, but a kind of
radical necessity. It requires us to find out who we really are—and,
nonviolently, in the steps of Gandhi and King and many others, to act.
In some cases, to lay everything—everything—on the line.

And it
requires us to be honest, with one another and with ourselves, about the
situation we face. We’ll never have a movement radical enough, or
humane enough, until we are.

Retired NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein declared that the global warming doctrine had no clothes back in 2009.
Weinstein worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center,
finishing his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. So it
is good to hear that he is still going strong. The dialogue below
is from a recent email correspondence with Rick Loberger

Weinstein:

I
retired from NASA in 2007, and this blog was posted 2009. However,
there was not any NASA policy on the issue. In fact many of the top NASA
people are skeptics of significant human caused global warming. This
includes the former NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, many of the
astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt and several others,
and many of the original Apollo support team. In fact a group of them
sent a letter to congress objecting to the government position. In
addition, several petitions were made by thousands of scientists (over
30,000 in one case including 9,000 PhD's) that gave skeptics positions. I
am enclosing some lists in a zip file, including a more recent ppt by
Burt Rutan with more info.

The main stream media and government,
and many collages, have fed a one sided position that makes most people
think the issue is settled, but that is a big lie. I, as well as many
of the worlds top scientists consider the current positions to be one of
the biggest scientific scandals in history, where some well meaning
scientists jumped to a conclusion, and socialist leaning governments
jumped on board and started to force the issue.

Keep in mind
that essentially no proposal to prove AGW wrong is funded or allowed to
be published, so all proposals and funding is directed to support a lie
that is becoming impossible to maintain.

In a few years the
issue will explode. I do expect a modest ENSO to occur this year, so a
small temperature spike will likely occur. However this will probably be
followed by La Nina (resulting in cooling), and the average global
temperature by 2020 will likely be flat to down for over 20 years. This
would support the claims of human caused problems as being wrong.

Rick Loberger:

I
appreciate your response and would agree on what you are espousing. I
am a supervisor for wikianswers.com and find it frustrating that when it
comes to global warming issues, only one position is allowed to be
stated, despite the ability to back up an alternative position.

Like
you, I tend to believe that the current warming we believe to have
experienced is not out of lines of natural events. It appears to me to
be more of a political issue to force lifestyle modifications on
unwitting participants that are unable or unwilling to look at facts.

I
have been an engineer working with various aspects of alternative
energy and get very frustrated when I see specs for items I am dealing
with being displayed. Our solar applications, for example, can not reach
60% of what is being claimed. I was involved with a wind farm in
northern Michigan a few years ago. The Governor demanded we add a
"return on investment" display in the marina to show the energy payback
of the three million dollar system. When he saw it showing that the
payback was still sixty years away and two of the four towers had
maintenance techs working on them, he agreed to let us shut the display
down.

Sadly this is not that uncommon. UW- Milwaukee has a solar
collection system that is equally terrible in terms of payback. I was
showing my 18 year old daughter the system and the fact that payback was
still fifty years away and a student walking by informed us that the
administration told them it was already at a positive position in terms
of generating income. How does one even begin to explain to "minds of
mush" that a solar collection system can not possibly be neutral in
terms of payback in under a year?

It is refreshing to see that
some people still are able to use logic. I do thank you for responding. I
honestly needed the pep talk and you were a bright spot in my day. I
hope I did not bore you, or eat up your time foolishly. It is a weird
coincidence that we even talked, but I am very glad I had the
opportunity to email you.

Thanks for your assistance. I actually meant more than you know.

Via email

EPA Chief Flying to 5 Cities to Urge Carbon Reduction

EPA
Administrator Gina McCarthy is flying around the country this week to
"ask Americans to act on climate change through simple actions to reduce
carbon pollution in their daily lives," a news release said.

Her
first stop is New York City, where she will appear on "The Daily Show"
with Jon Stewart Monday night to plug President Obama's Climate Action
Plan, which supposedly will "slow the effects of climate change and
leave a cleaner, more stable environment for future generations."

On
Tuesday, Earth Day, McCarthy will be in her home state of
Massachusetts, appearing first at the New England Aquarium, and later,
throwing out the first pitch at the Red Sox-Yankees game at Fenway Park.
McCarthy is an avid Red Sox fan, according to the EPA website.

Wednesday,
it's on to Cleveland for a press conference on the health impacts of
air pollution. McCarthy also will deliver the keynote address at a
climate meeting.

Thursday, McCarthy will join the Hip Hop Caucus
"Act on Climate Tour" in Atlanta, where she'll "speak about the
disproportionate impacts and the costs of climate change" on poor
communities.

McCarthy winds up her tour Friday in Memphis, Tenn.

As
the EPA advises Americans to reduce their carbon footprint, McCarthy
herself is a frequent user of carbon-emitting conveyances.

According
to a "day in the life" feature on the EPA's website, McCarthy "keeps a
small apartment near EPA headquarters," but "almost every weekend
McCarthy travels back to Boston, to her home and her husband."

Last week, McCarthy traveled to Taiwan and Vietnam to promote continued cooperation on various environmental issues.

As
part of this week's tour, McCarthy will urge Americans to take what the
EPA calls "simple actions," such as "changing a light bulb, powering
down electronics, using less water and recycling." By doing those
things, the press release said, "we can all reduce carbon pollution."

Could biofuels be HARMING the environment? Ethanol produces MORE CO2 emissions than petrol, study claims

In
a blow to ‘green’ fuel campaigners, a recent study has shown that
biofuels made from the leftovers of corn plants are worse than petrol in
releasing harmful emissions.

The find directly challenges both
European and U.S. policymakers who claim biofuels are a much cleaner oil
alternative and could help combat climate change.

But a $500,000
(£297,000) by the U.S. government claims that biofuels made with corn
residue release 7 per cent more greenhouse gases in the early years
compared with conventional petrol.

While biofuels are better in
the long run, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln study claims they won't
meet a standard set in a 2007 U.S. energy law to qualify as renewable
fuel.

However, the biofuel industry and U.S. administration immediately criticised the research as flawed.

They
said it was too simplistic in its analysis of carbon loss from soil,
which can vary over a single field, and vastly overestimated how much
residue farmers actually would remove once the market gets underway.

'The
core analysis depicts an extreme scenario that no responsible farmer or
business would ever employ because it would ruin both the land and the
long-term supply of feedstock. It makes no agronomic or business
sense,’ said Jan Koninckx, global business director for biorefineries at
DuPont.

Later this year the company is scheduled to finish a
$200 million (£119 million) facility in Nevada, Iowa, that will produce
30 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol using corn residue from nearby
farms.

An assessment paid for by DuPont said that the ethanol it
will produce there could be more than 100 per cent better than gasoline
in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

The research is among the
first to attempt to quantify, over 12 Corn Belt states, how much carbon
is lost to the atmosphere when the stalks, leaves and cobs that make up
residue are removed and used to make biofuel, instead of left to
naturally replenish the soil with carbon.

The study found that regardless of how much corn residue is taken off the field, the process contributes to global warming.

‘I
knew this research would be contentious,’ said Adam Liska, the lead
author and an assistant professor of biological systems engineering at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. ‘I'm amazed it has not come out more
solidly until now.'

He has a new book due out next month called NOT fOR GREENS
with the subheading: "He who sups with the Devil should have a
long spoon". It is a A full frontal attack on Greens, their climate and
energy policy etc etc. Quite a bit on US energy policy, fracking and US
coal. Price: $29.95. The blurb is below

The
processes required to make a humble stainless steel teaspoon are
remarkably complicated and every stage involves risk, coal, energy,
capital, international trade and finance. Stainless steel cutlery has
taken thousands of years of experimentation and knowledge to evolve and
the end result is that we can eat without killing ourselves with
bacteria. We are in the best times to have ever lived on planet Earth
and the future will only be better. All this we take for granted.

Greens
may have started as genuine environmentalists. Much of the green
movement has now morphed into an unelected extremist political pressure
group accountable to no one. Greens create problems, many of which are
concocted, and provide no solutions because of a lack of basic
knowledge. This book examines green policies in the light of established
knowledge and shows that they are unrealistic.

Policies by
greens adopted by supine governments have resulted in rising costs,
increased taxes, political instability, energy poverty, decreased
longevity and provide no solutions because of a lack of basic knowledge.
This book examines green policies in the light of established knowledge
and shows that they are unrealistic.

Policies by greens adopted
by supine governments have resulted in rising costs, increased taxes,
political instability, energy poverty, decreased longevity and
environmental degradation and they don’t achieve their ideological aims.
Wind, solar and biomass energy emit more carbon dioxide than they save
and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions does nothing to change climate
and only empties the pocket. No stainless steel teaspoon could be made
using green “alternative energy”.

This book argues that unless
the greens live sustainably in caves in the forest and use no trappings
of the modern world, then they should be regarded as hypocrites and
treated with the disdain they deserve.

In
the past 50 years, world per capita income roughly trebled in real
terms, corrected for inflation. If it continues at this rate (and
globally the great recession of recent years was a mere blip) then it
will be nine times as high in 2100 as it was in 2000, at which point the
average person in the world will be earning three times as much as the
average Briton earns today.

I make this point partly to cheer you
up on Easter Monday about the prospects for your great-grandchildren,
partly to start thinking about what that world will be like if it were
to happen, and partly to challenge those who say with confidence that
the future will be calamitous because of climate change or environmental
degradation. The curious thing is that they only predict disaster by
assuming great enrichment. But perversely, the more enrichment they
predict, the greater the chance (they also predict) that we will solve
our environmental problems.

Past performance is no guide to
future performance, of course, and a well aimed asteroid could derail
any projection. But I am not the one doing the extrapolating. In 2012,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asked the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to generate
five projections for the economy of the world, and of individual
countries, in 2050 and 2100.

They make fascinating reading. The
average per capita income of the world in 2100 is projected to be
between three and 20 times what it is today in real terms. The OECD’s
“medium” scenario, known as SSP2, also known as “middle of the road” or
“muddling through”, sounds pretty dull. It is a world in which, in the
OECD’s words, “trends typical of recent decades continue” with “slowly
decreasing fossil fuel dependency”, uneven development of poor
countries, delayed achievement of Millennium Development Goals,
disappointing investment in education and “only intermediate success in
addressing air pollution or improving energy access for the poor”.

And
yet this is a world in which by 2100 the global average income per head
has increased 13-fold to $100,000 (in 2005 dollars) compared with
$7,800 today. Britain will be very slightly below that average by then,
yet has still trebled its income per head. According to this middling
scenario, the average citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who
today earns $300 a year, will then earn $42,000, or roughly what an
American earns today. The average Indonesian, Brazilian or Chinese will
be at least twice as rich as today’s American.

Remember this is
in today’s money, corrected for inflation, but people will be spending
it on tomorrow’s technologies, most of which will be cleverer, cleaner
and kinder to the environment than today’s — and all for the same price.
Despite its very modest assumptions, it is an almost unimaginable
world: picture Beverly Hills suburbs in Kinshasa where pilotless planes
taxi to a halt by gravel drives (or something equally futuristic).
Moreover, the OECD reckons that inequality will have declined, because
people in poor countries will have been getting rich faster than people
in rich countries, as is happening now. All five storylines produce a
convergence, though at different rates, between the incomes of poor and
rich countries.

Can the planet survive this sort of utopian
plutocracy? Actually, here it gets still more interesting. The IPCC has
done its own projections to see what sort of greenhouse gas emissions
these sorts of world would produce, and vice versa. The one that
produces the lowest emissions is the one with the highest income per
head in 2100 — a 16-fold increase in income but lower emissions than
today: climate change averted. The one that produces the highest
emissions is the one with the lowest GDP — a mere trebling of income per
head. Economic growth and ecological improvement go together. And it is
not mainly because environmental protection produces higher growth, but
vice versa. More trade, more innovation and more wealth make possible
greater investment in low-carbon energy and smarter adaptation to
climate change. Next time you hear some green, doom-mongering Jeremiah
insisting that the only way to avoid Armageddon is to go back to eating
home-grown organic lentils cooked over wood fires, ask him why it is
that the IPCC assumes the very opposite.

In the IPCC’s nightmare
high-emissions scenario, with almost no cuts to emissions by 2100, they
reckon there might be north of 4 degrees of warming. However, even this
depends on models that assume much higher “climate sensitivity” to
carbon dioxide than the consensus of science now thinks is reasonable,
or indeed than their own expert assessment assumes for the period to
2035.

And in this storyline, by 2100 the world population has
reached 12 billion, almost double what it was in 2000. This is unlikely,
according to the United Nations: 10.9 billion is reckoned more
probable. With sluggish economic growth, the average income per head has
(only) trebled. The world economy is using a lot of energy,
improvements in energy efficiency having stalled, and about half of it
is supplied by coal, whose use has increased tenfold, because progress
in other technologies such as shale gas, solar and nuclear has been
disappointing.

I think we can all agree that this is a pretty
unlikely future. It’s roughly like projecting forward from 1914 to a
wealthy 2000 but with more people, lots more horse-drawn carriages and
coal-fuelled steamships, and no clean-air acts. But the point is that
making these sorts of assumption is the only way you can get to really
high levels of carbon dioxide in 2100. And even so, remember, the
average person is three times as rich. If the food supply had collapsed
and fossil fuels had run out, then there would hardly be 12 billion
people burning ten times as much coal and living like kings, would
there? You cannot have it both ways.

These IPCC and OECD reports
are telling us clear as a bell that we cannot ruin the climate with
carbon dioxide unless we get a lot more numerous and richer. And they
are also telling us that if we get an awful lot richer, we are likely to
have invented the technologies to adapt, and to reduce our emissions,
so we are then less likely to ruin the planet. Go figure.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

22 April, 2014

Global warming as an evangelical faith

This could almost be a spoof but I don't think it is

I
have always had the feeling that my life was lacking in a way. That I
was not doing enough of something. Yet, I could not figure out what that
something was. It was a void that needed to be filled.

I remember when climate change was only a word to me. I remember when recycling was only a chore to do.

I
remember all this so well because it was only fours months ago that I
started to care about what climate change actually meant.

My
sociology professor, whom I now consider to be a friend, first formally
introduced me to the concept of climate change. At first, I thought that
climate change was just a part of my sociology class—something that we
would be done with after a few classes. However, that was not the case.

After
several weeks of discussing the topic, I realized that climate change
was more than that to my professor. For him, it was a passion and he
felt an obligation to make his students also feel passionate about it.

I
come from a country that is considered one of the richest in the world.
A country where temperatures rise high enough to cook an egg on the
sidewalk. I was raised in Saudi Arabia.

Climate change has never
been a topic on the tongues of the students of Saudi Arabia. I cannot
recall once ever hearing about climate change from my teachers, friends,
classmates or family. This tells me that there is a huge population
oblivious to what is happening around the world.

As a country
that produces most of the fossil fuel distributed throughout the world,
it is no surprise that climate change is never discussed in Saudi
Arabia. That would be like admitting that the Saudi government has left a
huge carbon footprint.

Since I only had a rudimentary
understanding of climate change, I began researching more about it. I
came across several talks on the topic by people I had never heard of
before. One of them stood out to me. When talking about climate change,
this person had a look on her face that I did not see on others. She had
a look that was very familiar to me. In no time at all I remembered
where I had seen that look before. It was the same look my professor had
when he spoke about climate change. It was the look of passion.

This
person’s name is Rachel Kyte, who is the World Bank’s principal
advocate for raising global awareness of climate change. Ms. Kyte has
given many talks about climate change over the years, and is helping
inspire a social change in the world. Her speeches are inspirational. I
remember thinking, how can I be like this person?

A week later, I
was granted an opportunity that comes once in a lifetime. Have you ever
wished you had the chance to meet someone and were granted that chance?
My professor gave me that chance. He had sent me an invitation to
attend the Connect4Climate screening of Years of Living Dangerously at
the World Bank. The film was a preview of a new television series on
climate change.

I could not believe how lucky I was. I
immediately accepted the invitation and on the day of the screening I
arrived at the World Bank a little bit ahead of time in the hope that I
would be able to talk to Ms. Kyte. Unfortunately, I was not able to find
her then. I was ushered to a seat in the auditorium, where I waited
eagerly for the talk to begin. I sat straighter than I usually do and
became stiff as a board.

While waiting I realized that there are a
lot more people than I thought who are interested in the cause as of
climate change. I realized that I was not fighting for lost cause. I
felt supported.

The event started with World Bank President Jim
Yong Kim stating facts about how he and his organization are trying to
deal with climate change. After his talk, he invited three people on
stage for a discussion about the importance of climate change and what
we might expect to happen to the world if nothing is done to combat it.
Ms. Kyte was moderator of the discussion.

The film that followed
was something that can only be described as a dream. I could not believe
what I was watching. It portrayed the world we live in the today, and
the catastrophes that are happening all around us because of climate
change. The movie contained many famous people who are also interested
in the battle against humans’ constant greed, which is killing the very
planet we live on.

The movie screening ended with a round of
applause from the audience. I on the other hand had a hard time looking
up. I was extremely emotional. The movie had a lot of elements that
would have made a stonehearted man break down in tears. I managed to
compose myself. I was determined to get a word in with Ms. Kyte.

After
wriggling myself between reporters, I finally managed to reach her only
to be dumbstruck. I had a small speech prepared on how much she has
inspired me but was only able to stutter a bit. Somehow, I managed to
compose myself and was able to say a few words to her about that. I was
also able to pluck up the courage to ask her if she would be
photographed with me. She was happy to oblige.worldbankclimateRachel
Kyte, the World Bank’s principal advocate for raising global awareness
of climate change, with Suleiman Ahmad Allauddin Khan. Photo credit:
Ivan Bruce / Connect4Climate

After leaving the auditorium I had a
funny feeling in my gut. Walking past a glass window I saw a smile on
my face that looked a bit out of place. After a few minutes I was able
to put on a more socially acceptable smile.

I made my way to the
small feast our hosts had put together for us. I was greeted by my
professor and one of my classmates. My professor was also surrounded by
two of his former students. As soon as I was introduced to them I felt
an instant connection form between us. We shared the same cause and had
the same inspiration.

After leaving my professors side I was
struck with a new realization. I realized that the people who had
attended the screening with me were not only from the U.S. There were
people from China, Poland, India, Italy, Ivory, Coast, South Africa and
even a fellow Saudi Arabian.

To see that there were people at the
event from all over the world helped encourage me to stand firm and
pursue my cause for as long as I my bones and muscles will allow me. To
see a fellow countryman at the event was evidence enough that these
people managed to get the word across the world. More and more people
were becoming aware of our cause.

Suddenly I knew what I could do
to help. I knew that I had to spread the word, to inspire as many
people as I can. I decided that I would take on my professor’s legacy
and enlighten the minds of people about the dangers of climate change.

I left the World Bank a new person. I left with a new purpose in life. I left with a cause.

A
nation without adequate energy production is a nation in decline and
that has been the President’s agenda since the day he took office in
2009. He even announced his war on coal during the 2008 campaign even
though, at the time, it was providing fifty percent of the electricity
being utilized.

It’s useful to know that the U.S. has huge coal
reserves, enough to provide energy for hundreds of years and reduce our
debt through its export to nations such as Japan. It increased
coal-fired power generation by ten percent in 2013 while Germany’s coal
use reached the highest level since 1990. Both China and India are
increasing the use of coal. So why is coal unwelcome in the U.S.?
Because Obama says so.

On April 15, the White House held a “Solar
Summit” to continue promoting subsidies for solar panels and the Obama
Energy Department has announced another $15 million in “solar market
pathways” to fund local government’s use of solar energy. Its “Capital
Solar Challenge” is directing federal agencies, military bases, and
other federally subsidized buildings to use solar power.

According
to the Institute for Energy Research, “solar energy provides two-tenths
of one percent of the total energy consumed in the United States. While
the amount of solar electricity capacity in the U.S. has increased in
recent years…it still only accounts for 0.1% of net electricity
generated…the least among the renewable sources of hydroelectric,
biomass, wind and solar.”

So, in addition to the millions lost in
earlier loans to solar companies like Solyndra that failed not long
after pocketing our tax dollars, Obama is using the power of the federal
government to waste more money on this unpredictable—the Sun only
shines in the daytime and clouds can get in the way—source of energy
whose “solar farms” take up many acres just to provide a faction of what
a coal-fired or natural gas powered plant does.

This isn’t some
loony environmental theory at work although the Greens oppose all manner
of energy provision and use whether it is coal, oil or natural gas.
This is a direct attack on the provision of energy, fueled by any
source, that America needs to function and meeting the needs of its
population, manufacturing, and all other uses.

The most recent
example of this is the further extension of the delay on the
construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to refineries on
the Gulf Coast. That too is part of Obama’s war on energy for the
nation, but it may also have something to do with the fact that the
Burlington Santa Fe Railroad owns all of the rail lines in the U.S.
connecting to western Canada. They haul 80% or more of the crude oil
from Canada to the Midwest and Texas, earning a tidy sum in the process.
It is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, a major contributor
to Democrat causes and candidates. The Keystone XL pipeline could
divert more than $2 billion a year and if its delay is not crony
capitalism, nothing is.?This is what the Sierra Club is telling
its members and supporters as of Monday, April 21: “Keystone XL means
cancer. It means wolf blood spilled. And it’s nothing short of a climate
disaster.” It is a lie from start to finish.

Keystone has become
a political issue and the announcement by the Obama State Department
that is giving agencies “additional time” to approve its construction
due to ongoing litigation before the Nebraska Supreme Court that could
affect its route brought forth protests from red-state Democrats in
Congress who even threatened to find ways to go around the President to
get the project approved. Eleven Democratic senators have written to the
President to urge him to make a final decision by the end of May. Some
of them will be up for reelection in the November midterm elections.

Even
Congress, though, seems incapable of over-ruling or overcoming Obama’s
war on the provision of energy sources. In early April, the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM) released new data showing that federal onshore oil
and natural gas leases and drilling permits are at the lowest levels in
more than a decade. Leases to companies exploring the potential of oil
and natural gas reserves were down in 2013 from 1.8 million acres the
year before to 1.2 million, the smallest area since records began to be
maintained in 1988!

We have a President who gives daily evidence
of his contempt both for those who voted for him and those who did not.
His anti-energy agenda impacts on the creation of jobs, causes
manufacturing to delay expansion or to go off-shore, reduces the revenue
the government needs to reduce its debts and deficits, and drives up
the cost of energy for everyone.

And he is doing this in one of the most energy-rich nations on the planet.

When
Andy Richards saw a dazzling light beaming through his bedroom window,
his first thought was of alien invasion. ‘It was like The Day Of The
Triffids,’ he says. ‘This brilliant white glare.’

Opening his
curtains, he realised the source was more mundane. It came from the
street light outside the two-bedroom home he shares with his wife Kate
in Chiswick, West London.

Unbeknown to the couple, Hounslow
council had installed LED lamp-heads on the street lights along their
quiet residential road. The gentle, golden glow of the old lamps has
been replaced by a harsh beam which, they say, makes it impossible for
them to sleep.

So desperate have the couple become, they have taped a large pieces of black cardboard to their windows.

‘It’s
like a World War II blackout,’ says Andy, a 61-year-old record
producer, who has lived on the street for 25 years. ‘It was the only
thing we could do. We’ve had three miserable weeks without sleep.’

The
council claims LED lights were chosen because they use less energy, so
they are cheaper to operate and more environmentally friendly than
conventional sodium bulbs.

After several weeks of pestering from
Andy — he started texting local councillor Colin Ellar, a proponent of
the new system, at 2am ‘so that he knew what it was like to go without
sleep’ — the council has agreed to dim the lights for a trial period.

However,
despite the protestations of the Richardses and their neighbours, the
council won’t be reconsidering its plan to replace almost 16,000 lights
across the borough. And Hounslow isn’t the only council eagerly
embracing LED street lights. Across Britain, local authorities have
fallen for the new ‘energy efficient’ lighting.

Bury council in
Manchester has announced plans to change 11,000 street lights on 1,850
side-roads throughout the borough by 2017.

Similar schemes are
under way at Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire and Blackburn in Lancashire,
as well as parts of Birmingham, Sheffield, Gloucestershire and Glasgow.

And
the picturesque Norfolk town of Fakenham can be seen in a whole new
light — literally — thanks to the instalment of 30 LED lamps in the town
centre.

Fans of LED lamps, which first appeared on British
streets in 2011, point to the environmental and financial advantages
they offer.

While conventional sodium street lamps light up when
an electric current is passed through lithium gas, making it glow, lamps
powered by LEDs — light-emitting diodes — glow when current passes
through a solid material such as gallium, known as a semiconductor.

They
use up to 60 per cent less energy than sodium lamps and are said
to last up to eight times longer, reducing maintenance costs and halving
electricity bills.

They are also easy to operate. LEDs produce
light immediately when they are switched on rather than taking time to
heat up, and can be controlled remotely via digital sensors.

It has even been claimed that their bright ‘floodlight-style’ beams will deter criminals.

Yet wherever LED lights are installed, they leave residents in uproar.

In
Llandough, Wales, locals have organised a petition to have their
recently installed LED street lights removed and replaced with the
originals.

Last year, Bath council was forced temporarily to stop
replacing the city’s street lamps with LEDs and hold a public
consultation, so vociferous were complaints after the first 2,000 were
erected.

And in Trafford, Manchester, residents have threatened
to take their council to court if it continues with plans to replace all
its 27,000 street lights.

But why are the objections so strong?
If the lights can, as Hounslow council promises, be dimmed if
necessary — and if they use less energy, save money and reduce crime —
what is so wrong with the new system?

Rather a lot, it turns out.
Because, it seems that in their rush to embrace the new ‘green’
technology, Britain’s councils have ignored several serious health
issues.

Studies have indicated that LED lights disrupt sleep by
suppressing the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone which governs
our sleep patterns. All light consists of different colour combinations,
and visible light falls on a rainbow-like spectrum, which extends from
red to blue. Natural light combines all the colours of the spectrum, but
the light given off by LEDs is overwhelmingly blue.

Too much
‘blue light’ suppresses our biological clock, resulting in lower-quality
sleep. This in turn increases the likelihood of heart disease, obesity
and diabetes. It damages the immune system and leaves sufferers
vulnerable to depression and anxiety.

It has even been suggested
that too much exposure to LED light causes blindness. Last year, a
Spanish study suggested that the light emitted by LED bulbs can damage
cells in the retina. By way of illustrating just how potent their glare
can be, consider that LED lights are generally banned in art galleries
because they bleach the paint on works on display.

‘They are
dangerous and potentially damaging,’ says Simon Nicholas, a 53-year-old
chartered engineer who successfully campaigned to stop LED lights being
erected in Trafford until further research is done.

Certainly,
there was no inquiry into the health implications of the lights before
they were installed in Chiswick. Indeed, councillor Colin Ellar claims
to have been unaware of the dangers, which were widely reported, until a
few days ago. Meanwhile, those affected by councils’ new-found zeal for
the LED bulbs are questioning just how much taxpayers’ money they will,
ultimately, save.

Roderick Binns, 65, who lives a few doors away
from Andy and Kate, says his council bills have increased.
‘It doesn’t feel as though any reduction is being passed on.’

In
fact, the initial cost of installing LED lamps is remarkably high.
Replacing Trafford’s lights would cost £9.3?million. Although in some
instances the bulbs can be installed on top of posts that are already in
place, in others installing LED involves ripping down and replacing the
entire lamp frame, at a cost of about £500 a unit.

Essex County
Council was recently forced to halt plans to replace its lamps when it
emerged that the work involved would cost a staggering £31?million.

Even with the energy savings the lights should bring, it could take 20 years for installation costs to be recouped.

Simon
Nicholas, who campaigned against the lights in Trafford, says: ‘If you
were saving energy at home, would you buy a new £500 unit or put a
low-watt bulb in? Why can’t they just do that?’

Roderick Binns, a
property consultant, says that residents in Chiswick could actually
lose money because the unsightly lights might affect the value of their
homes.

‘For those right in front of a light, they’re a negative, not a positive,’ he says.

What’s
more, contradicting the claim that bright LED light would lower crime
rates, some say the lights may in fact increase antisocial behaviour.

Studies
into the effect of lighting on crime have produced mixed results. LED
lamps tend to focus their light on one particular spot instead of
diffusing light evenly, as their predecessors did. As a result, they
leave some patches of street and pavement almost entirely unlit — and
potentially vulnerable to criminals.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’
says Les Godwin, a councillor in Prestbury, Chesire, who is opposing the
introduction of LEDs in his neighbourhood. ‘If you have a well-lit area
and you turn it into one with dark parts, that can’t be good.’

Councillor
Ellar admits that, as well as receiving complaints over the brightness
of the lights, he has been told by residents ‘in around 25 instances’
that coverage where they live is so patchy, the streets are now too
dimly lit.

Above all, what appears to have angered people is that
LED lamps, like so many other modern innovations, are an ugly and
potentially harmful blot on the urban landscape.

‘The colour
rendering is awful,’ says Roderick Binns. ‘Street lamps usually
give a kind of gentle glow but this is a harsh white light. It’s very
off-putting.’

In Manchester, the lights have been nicknamed ‘UFO lamps’ because of their unforgiving glare.

Given
that some of Britain’s lampposts date back to the 19th century, ripping
them down in large numbers is a rather poignant loss to local
historians. As Simon Nicholas puts it: ‘You wouldn’t rip down
historic statues. It’s vandalism.

‘It’s a matter for central government — at the moment nobody’s paying attention and nobody’s stopping this. It’s worrying.’

Until then, it will be down to determined home-owners like him to protect their streets from the invasion of the UFO lamps.

Al
Gore flew across the Pacific to the Aloha State last week – no word on
how big his carbon footprint was – to proclaim of the climate debate,
“Ultimately, we are going to win this thing.” It's imperative, he
explained: “Our way of life is at stake, our grandchildren are at stake,
the future of civilization is at stake,” and those with contrary views
are simply “immoral, unethical and despicable.”

Such rhetoric
has been preached for decades now, only alarmists' clamor has grown as
the debate takes a decided turn. Public support for this hoax is rapidly
cooling, prompting even more extreme scaremongering.

Earth is
nearing two decades of no observed global warming, the U.S. hasn't been
struck by a major hurricane in nearly a decade, tornadoes in the
Heartland occur at a historically low rate, the Great Lakes are still
nearly 40% ice covered as of April 17, global sea ice is above average,
and Antarctic ice extent continues to shatter daily records. But who
needs facts when you can slander your opponents?

Silicon
Valley electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors is both a victim and
victimizer. It is a victim of laws enacted in Arizona, Maryland, New
Jersey, Texas, and Virginia that prohibit automakers from selling
directly to consumers. (New York and Ohio will soon join the list.)
Tesla is also a victimizer—a corporate welfare queen whose business
model relies on a $465 million federal loan, Chinese
government-subsidized lithium-ion batteries, and a California
government-created “marketplace” for clean-air credits. As Independent
Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin W. Powell notes, both kinds of
victimization—the prohibitions and the subsidies—harm the public.

The
bans on manufacturer-to-consumer auto sales harm consumers by reducing
competition for the benefit of auto dealers. The government subsidies
harm the taxpayers who are forced to fund them. But what about the
environmental benefits of zero-emissions vehicles? The notion that
Tesla’s electric cars can curb carbon dioxide emissions overall is pure
fantasy, according to Powell. It’s a case of looking only at one locale
while ignoring the effects on activity elsewhere in the world.

“To
the extent that more widespread use of electric cars in the United
States lessens our demand for oil, it depresses the price of oil
compared to what it would have been, and simply leads to greater oil
consumption in other parts of the world,” Powell writes. Tesla is a
technological innovator—and a crony capitalist. To determine whether it
is truly a market innovator, it would have to forego government
subsidies and succeed on a level playing field. “If the government left
the auto industry alone, market prices would dictate which technologies
should go into the production of automobiles and how those cars should
be delivered to consumers,” Powell continues. “Some companies would win
and some would lose, but all consumers would be better off.”

The
U.S. Supreme Court will decide later this year whether or not the
Environmental Protection Agency can use the risk of global warming as
the basis for curtailing coal-generated electricity. According to
Independent Institute Research Fellow S. Fred Singer, the Court could
bring about a paradigm shift away from climate alarmism—if it cites the
growing number of studies that challenge the conclusions of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Those studies,
collected and republished by the Non-governmental International Panel on
Climate Change (NIPCC), look closely at the biological and societal
impacts of climate change as well as the physical science that
informs—or should inform—the public-policy debate. The NIPCC finds that
the human contribution to global climate change is very small and
practically indistinguishable from natural variability; that modest
temperature rises have been and will continue to have positive effects
overall on flora, fauna, and human welfare; that the cost of mitigation
through emissions reductions would far exceed any benefits; and that the
many laws and regulations already adopted to combat global warming now
merit re-evaluation, modification, or repeal.

The Supreme Court
decision could reverse momentum for more greenhouse gas restrictions.
But if the Court sides with coal regulators, the odds will increase for a
treaty to come out of next year’s Paris conference on climate change.
The adoption and enforcement of such a treaty would hardly be a sure
thing, however. “So far, only Western Europe seems to be keen on
ratifying [a greenhouse-gas treaty]—and even there, doubts are
developing,” Singer writes. “Eastern Europe is definitely against any
new Protocol, as are Japan, Australia, and Canada.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

21 April, 2014

EPA’s Tower of Pisa policies

Using lies to shore up policies built on shaky foundations of climate, peak oil and sustainability

Paul Driessen

Built
on a foundation of sand, the Leaning Tower of Pisa would have toppled
over long ago, if not for ingenious engineering projects that keep it
from tilting any further. The same thing is true of ethanol, automobile
mileage, power plant pollution and many other environmental policies.

Not
only are they built on flimsy foundations of peak oil, sustainability
and dangerous manmade climate change. They are perpetuated by garbage
in-garbage out computer models and a system that rewards activists,
politicians, bureaucrats and corporations that support the hypotheses
and policies.

At the heart of this system is the increasingly
secretive and deceptive U.S. Environmental Protection Administration.
Among its perpetrators are two ideologically driven regulators who are
responsible for many of today’s excessive environmental regulations.
When the corruption is combined with the EPA’s history of regulatory
overkill and empire building, it paints a portrait of an agency that is
out of control.

EPA’s culture of misconduct has already raised
congressional hackles over the misuse of government credit cards (a
recent EPA audit found that 93% of purchases were personal and contrary
to agency guidelines); former regional EPA administrator (and now Sierra
Club official) Al Amendariz wanting to “crucify” oil companies to make
examples of them; and former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who
masqueraded as “Richard Windsor,” to avoid revelation and oversight of
her emails with activists.

However, these sorry tales pale in
comparison to damaging EPA malfeasance detailed in a new U.S. Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee minority staff report about
convicted felon and con artist John Beale. This guy was convicted of
bilking taxpayers out of $900,000 – by convincing EPA bosses and
colleagues that he was a CIA agent, failing to show up for work for
months, but continuing to receive his six-figure salary. However, these
were minor transgressions compared to what he was not prosecuted for.

Beale
has admitted he had no legislative or environmental policy experience
prior to being hired. Yet he became the lead official for the nation’s
National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone and Particulate Matter.
He and Robert Brenner, his friend and immediate supervisor at EPA,
concocted a nefarious plan that used manipulated scientific studies,
faulty or even bogus regulatory cost assessments, “heavy-handed
management of interagency review processes,” and even illegal
experiments on human test subjects, to impose increasingly tougher,
job-killing regulations on US industries.

One of Beale &
Brenner’s first actions was to work with the American Lung Association
in 1997 in a sue-and-settle arrangement, which led to ozone and
particulate matter standards. This underhanded practice enables EPA
officials to meet with environmentalist groups behind closed doors and
agree to new proposed regulations. Later, the group files a “friendly
suit,” and a court orders the agency to adopt the pre-arranged rules.
Meanwhile, EPA awarded the ALA $20 million between 2001 and 2010. (Had a
business had such an arrangement, it would likely have been prosecuted
as an illegal kickback.)

The EPW Committee’s report notes that
Beale & Brenner fine-tuned the sue-and-settle idea – and then
intentionally overstated the benefits and understated the costs of new
regulations. As a result, Beale & Brenner successfully rammed the
PM2.5 and ozone standards through the EPA’s approval process and set the
stage for myriad additional regulations that likewise did not receive
appropriate scientific scrutiny.

In the case of PM2.5 soot
particles, the ALA worked with Beale & Brenner to claim tougher
regulations would eliminate up to 35,700 premature deaths and 1.4
million cases of aggravated asthma annually. Scientists questioned the
figures and said EPA’s flawed research merely “assumed” a
cause-and-effect relationship between soot and health effects, but
failed to prove one. Indeed, EPA’s illegal experiments exposed people to
“lethal” doses of soot, but harmed only an elderly woman with heart
problems.

Beale & Brenner pressed on. Not only were the
initial PM2.5 and ozone regulations put into effect, but the
questionable and non-peer-reviewed data has been used repeatedly as the
basis for additional regulations. According to the Senate report, “up to
80 percent of the benefits associated with all federal regulations are
attributed to supposed PM 2.5 reductions… [and] the EPA has continued to
rely upon the secret science … to justify the vast majority of all
Clean Air Act regulations issued to this day.”

As a House
subcommittee has pointed out, the long and growing list of EPA
regulations involves costly changes to automobiles, trucks, ships,
utilities, cement plants, refineries and gasoline, to name a few. The
rules also raise consumer prices, eliminate jobs, and thus actually
reduce human living standards, health and welfare – all of which EPA
steadfastly ignores, in violation of federal laws and regulations.

Just
one EPA industrial boiler emissions regulation will put as many as
16,000 jobs at risk for every $1 billion spent in upgrade or compliance
costs, IHS Global Insight calculates. The Administration’s regulatory
War on Coal, amply illustrated by President Obama’s call to bankrupt the
coal industry in the name of alleged manmade climate change, could
eliminate up to 16,600 direct and indirect jobs by 2015.

Despite
the economic damage, EPA applauded Beale’s regulatory success, and he
quickly became one of the federal government’s most powerful and highest
paid employees. Even Administrator Gina McCarthy had a hand in
advancing his fraudulent and pernicious career, when she appointed him
to manage the office of Air and Radiation’s climate change and other
international work in 2010.

Then in June 2011, Beale stopped
going to work. Despite having filed no retirement papers, under an
arrangement with McCarthy, he was allowed to continue receiving his
salary. When she finally met with him 15 months later, he said he had no
plans to retire. Two months later, Beale’s long-term unexcused
absence was finally referred to the Office of Inspector General for
investigation.

After McCarthy became the EPA Administrator in
July 2013, Beale pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 32 months
in federal prison. His partner-in-crime Brenner retired in 2011 before
the agency could take action against him for accepting an illegal gift
from a golfing buddy serving on the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee.
But again, these crimes pale in comparison to the tens of billions of
dollars that their junk science, sue-and-settle lawsuits and other
actions have cost US businesses and families.

Now Republican
members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are trying
to get to the bottom of the Brenner-Beale-EPA “secret science” that has
been used to justify so many regulations. On March 17, Sen. David Vitter
(R- LA) sent a letter to Dr. Francesca Grifo, EPA’s Scientific
Integrity Official, asking for the original scientific data and voicing
concerns about EPA’s apparent violations of international guidelines for
ensuring best practices and preventing scientific misconduct. EPA thus
far is claiming the research and data are proprietary or the agency
cannot find them. Teachers demand that students show their work; we
should demand the same from EPA – especially since we pay for it.

The
agency’s onslaught of carbon dioxide and other climate change
regulations – including proposed rules on cow flatulence (!) – is
similarly founded on fraudulent EPA and IPCC reports, false and
irrelevant claims of scientific “consensus,” and computer models that
bear no relationship to temperature, hurricane, drought and other
planetary realities. Even worse, it is on this flimsy, fraudulent,
lawless foundation that our government’s costly, intrusive environmental
and renewable energy policies are based – threatening our economy,
employment, living standards and families.

Meanwhile, Ms.
McCarthy is conducting business as usual. She recently presented her
proposed EPA’s FY 2015 budget to Congress. She says the increased
funding should be viewed as an “investment in maintaining a high
performing environmental protection organization.” You cannot make this
up.

Governors, attorneys general, state legislatures and private
citizen groups need to initiate legal actions and demand full discovery
of all relevant EPA documents. Congress too needs to take action. Along
with one on the IRS targeting scandal, it needs to appoint a select
committee or independent counsel to determine which data, computer
models and studies EPA used – and which ones it ignored – in reaching
its decisions.

Try
to ignore Earth Day, April 22. It won’t be easy. The print and
broadcast media will engage in an orgy of environmental tall tales and
the usual end-of-the-world predictions. It will scare the heck out of
youngsters and bore the heck out of anyone old enough to know that we
have had to endure the lies that hide the agendas that have driven the
Greens since 1970 when the event was first proclaimed.

The Earth
is 4.5 billion years old. It is the third planet from the Sun and
fifth-largest of the eight other planets that orbit it. It is the only
planet in our galaxy that has life on it and it has an abundance of
mineral resources as well as water and the fecundity to grow crops and
maintain livestock to sustain the human race.

The climate on
Earth is entirely dependent on the natural cycles of the Sun. Despite
four decades of being told that the Earth was going to heat up due to
greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide and methane, we are currently in a
cooling cycle and no child born since 1997 has ever experienced a single
day of the dreaded “global warming.”

Humans play a very small
role affecting the Earth’s climate although, for example, deforestration
is one way it has affects it. Other than cutting down trees, another
way is to put the government in charge of vast acres of forest. It has a
long record of failing to manage them well to the point where diseases
and pests render the trees so weak that wildfires wipe out what would
otherwise have thrived.

Otherwise, the Earth is and always has a
been a very volatile place, subject to a variety of extraordinary
natural events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards, floods,
droughts, tornadoes, and earthquakes. The only thing humans can do is
clean up and rebuild.

What has mostly changed for humans has been
the discovery of energy sources that have transformed and enhanced
their lives. Coal, initially, followed by oil and natural gas. All are
carbon based, but then, so are humans and other life forms.

The
Greens call them “fossil fuels” and some refer to “dirty coal” or seek
to demonize “Big Oil.” Between 2007 and 2012, three U.S. oil companies
paid a total of $289.7 billion in corporate income taxes. Until the
Obama administration took power, coal provided fifty percent of all the
electricity Americans used. Completely bogus “science” cited by the
Environmental Protection Agency has been used to shut down coal-fired
plants and close down coal mines. And, in concert with costly,
unpredictable and unreliable “renewable” energy, wind and solar, have
driven up the cost of electricity for everyone.

According to a
study by the Heritage Foundation, released in March, over the next two
decades the EPA’s climate rules aimed at reducing “global warming”
(which is not occurring) will cost the economy $2.23 trillion. An
estimated 600,000 jobs will be lost. The jobs that would be created by
the Keystone XL pipeline have been waiting five years for the White
House to approve the project.

As mentioned, it has been the many
inventions that utilize the energy sources the Greens want to “leave in
the ground” that have totally transformed the lives of Americans and
others throughout the world. What Earth Day is really about is not the
improvement of life, but limits that will reduce the world’s population.
The one thing all environmentalists agree upon is that there are too
many humans. This is a form of fascism that goes back to the creation of
the communist/socialist economic systems, none of which have provided
the level of prosperity that capitalism has. Even Communist China has
adopted the capitalist model.

The other agenda Greens agree upon
is that the government should own and control every square inch of the
nation’s (and world’s) landmass. That is why climate change is part of
the United Nations’ intention to become the single world government. It
is home to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has clung
to the global warming hoax since they invented it in the late 1980s.

Recently,
the IPCC released another report claiming “climate change” will melt
polar ice, cause the oceans to rise dramatically, generate extreme
weather conditions, et cetera. There have always been extreme weather
conditions somewhere and the rest of the IPCC claims are just great big
lies that have been around for decades.

Along the way,
environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Friends
of the Earth, among countless others of comparable or lesser size have
received millions in membership dues, donations, the sale of products,
and from the assets that many own. Many, like Greenpeace, enjoy a
non-profit status. For example, in 2011, Greenpeace took in $27,465,948
and had assets of $4,653,179. Multiply that against all the others and
it adds up to billions.

Green organizations represent a very big
business that is constantly at war with legitimate businesses in the
energy, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors, seeking to impose laws
and regulations that cost them and consumers billions every year.

If
you’re a parent take some time to explain to younger children that the
Earth is very old and not going to suffer the claims Greens repeat and
repeat. As for everyone else, just try to ignore the Earth Day deluge.
It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

Britain's
shale gas and oil industry could create tens of billions of pounds
worth of opportunities in the supply chain, a major report is expected
to say this week.

But the country currently lacks the equipment
and skilled workers needed to support fracking, presenting a potential
obstacle to the expansion of shale development.

Firms must start
equipping themselves to ensure they capitalise on the potential for tens
of thousands of jobs the industry could create, the report, backed by
ministers and the industry, is likely to say.

However, the
publication of a separate report mapping billions of barrels of shale
oil that lie beneath the south of England has now been delayed until at
least late May, The Telegraph has learnt.

The British Geological
Survey (BGS) has been studying the shale potential in Jurassic
formations in the Weald and Wessex basins, which span the Home Counties.

Michael
Fallon, the energy minister, had promised the report would be published
“by spring” this year. It will now not be released until after the
European elections on May 22 because of “purdah” preventing significant
or contentious announcements being made in the run-up to polling day.

The
BGS report is likely to be highly controversial because of strong local
opposition in parts of the Tory heartlands to potential drilling.
Attempts to drill for oil in Balcombe last summer by fracking firm
Cuadrilla led to months of protests, racking up a £4m policing bill.

The
US government’s Energy Information Administration estimated last year
that 17bn barrels of shale oil could lie beneath the Jurassic area,
which spans almost 3,500 square miles, and suggested that 700m barrels
could be recovered.

Mr Fallon has described the southern region
as “the second great belt of shale” after Bowland in the North, where
the BGS reported there could be enough gas to fuel Britain for more than
40 years.

Drilling in the South – where oil lies beneath Dorset,
Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey and Kent – would test whether those in the
region “like the flaring [burning off oil and gas] at the end of the
drive”, Mr Fallon was quoted as saying last year.

The energy
industry has acknowledged that while local opposition may be the biggest
obstacle to fracking, the immature supply chain could present a barrier
to the development of shale resources.

Britain lacks the necessary infrastructure and equipment, with barely a handful of onshore drilling rigs available.

A
report by the Institute of Directors, commissioned by fracking firm
Cuadrilla, also highlighted a lack of skilled labour as an obstacle,
pointing out there was already a skills shortage in the North Sea
offshore oil and gas industry.

Sources say this week’s report,
understood to have been commissioned by the UK Onshore Operators Group
and backed by ministers, will suggest a total supply chain opportunity
running into tens of billions of pounds.

It will highlight how specific sectors could benefit from shale, for example manufacturers of steel for fracking equipment.

Industry
sources say that companies and government alike must take action now to
ensure the fracking industry does not repeat the mistakes of Britain’s
offshore wind industry, which overwhelmingly has foreign manufacturers
and suppliers.

This week’s report will also be closely watched
for its estimate of jobs. An independent report by consultants Amec last
year suggested that up to 32,000 jobs could be created through fracking
in new areas being offered to companies this year – implying a maximum
of 64,000 jobs once those areas also under licence are included.

But
ministers have faced criticism from Labour for persisting in using a
figure from the IoD suggesting a total of 74,000 jobs would be created.

The
IoD’s report also suggested that each drilling site could represent an
investment of between £142m and £514m over its lifetime, with total
investment peaking at £3.7bn a year.

While
U.S. lawmakers are debating the merits of exporting natural gas to
Europe to break Russia’s energy hold on the continent, one immediately
exportable energy source has been overlooked: coal.

U.S. coal
exports have been booming in recent years due to rising demand around
the world. In fact, some European countries are already using U.S. coal
to displace costly Russian gas. Europe’s biggest importers of American
coal include Germany and the United Kingdom.

“The president is
doing his best to stop coal use in America by issuing emissions
standards that are so stringent it is not feasible to build a coal fired
power plant, but other countries are desperate for this valuable energy
resource and we are exporting coal in record numbers,” Republican
Kentucky Rep. Ed Whitfield told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

U.S.
coal exports have skyrocketed in recent years. Exports have grown from
about 59 million short tons of coal in 2007 to nearly 118 million short
tons last year, all while imports have fallen 75 percent over that time
period.

“Some European countries are using U.S. coal to help
displace Russian natural gas and neutralize Russia’s energy influence,”
Whitfield said. “Coal exports are already having an impact on
geopolitics and are helping to create American jobs and reduce our trade
deficit. We can build on this success by increasing natural gas exports
as well.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced many European
countries to rethink their reliance on natural gas that can be stopped
at any time by President Vladimir Putin. The European Union is debating
allowing hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to unlock vast shale gas
reserves as well as importing U.S. gas.

But importing U.S. gas is
not a short-term solution, as the Obama administration has moved slowly
in approving export terminals. Once an export terminal is approved, it
can take years before it comes online and begins shipping out gas.

Some
analysts expect U.S. coal exports to get another boost from the EU,
since it’s the only viable short-term substitute for natural gas.

The
shale gas boom in the United States has made domestic power producers
cleaner and turned coal producers into major exporters. A weak Europe,
anxious about fracking, is becoming reliant on cheap U.S. coal to fuel
its power stations, trapping it in a vicious cycle.

The ongoing
European trepidation towards shale gas is putting Europe at an
increasing economic disadvantage. The lack of energy competitiveness
vis-à-vis the United States has also become the biggest concern of
Europe’s industrialists, mentioned Leif Johansson, chairman of
AstraZeneca and Ericsson and head of the European Round Table of
Industrialists in a recent interview with the FT.

It is well
known that the shale gas revolution in the U.S. has led to a massive
drop in natural gas prices. From the peak in 2008, gas prices fell by
over 70 percent by January 2010 and have roughly remained at that level
since. This has led U.S. electricity producers to increasingly use
gas-fired power rather than coal-fired power plants to supply
electricity, with dramatic effects on the U.S. supply curves of
electricity

This has been positive for the U.S. on two fronts.
Firstly, natural gas is a cleaner fuel which is better for the
environment. Secondly, with more competition in the market for
electricity generation following the availability of shale gas,
electricity prices are falling for consumers, a massive saving for the
U.S. economy.

On the other hand, the preference for shale gas has left coal producers out in the cold.

U.S.
coal producers have seen a declining demand in steam coal from the U.S.
electricity sector. At the same time, they have maintained their annual
production volumes. While coal imports into the U.S. have dropped
dramatically, the excess coal production has needed to be stockpiled,
exported or both. Currently, U.S. coal producers are banking on export
markets to rid the stockpiles. A recent report from the U.S. Congress
framed this issue very clearly: “One of the big questions for the [U.S.
domestic coal] industry is how to penetrate the overseas market,
particularly in steam coal, to compensate for declining domestic
demand.”

U.S. coal producers have been successful at increasing
exports and reducing imports. From 2007 to 2012, coal exports more than
doubled with Europe taking about 58 percent of total exports in 2012, up
from 32 percent in 2007.

This was driven by cheaper coal. The
shale gas boom in the U.S. made coal less interesting to local
electricity generators and it was to be expected that European
electricity generators would capitalise on this “coal price revolution”.
This revolution is the opposite to what is happening in the U.S. Coal
had dropped from 25 percent of the total power mix in Europe in 2007 to
21 percent in 2010, but the trend reversed, starting in 2011, reaching
22 percent. In 2012, coal fired electricity output in Europe even rose
by 6 percent, a greater increase than Portugal’s total electricity
generation. The share of natural gas in the total power mix in Europe
increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2008 but had already
dropped to 17 percent by 2011.

A vicious economic – and ecological – energy cycle for Europe?

In
the absence of a European supply of inexpensive shale gas, the shift to
coal is a rational economic decision for European power generators. The
consequences of the shift, however, are detrimental on several fronts.
Firstly, in spite of lower coal prices, Europe’s energy cost position
relative to the U.S. will only further deteriorate. Secondly, the
negative knock-on effect of relatively higher energy costs on Europe’s
energy intensive industries creates further disadvantage for Europe,
already handicapped by very high structural costs. Thirdly, greenhouse
gas emissions, which are roughly twice as high for coal fired plants
than for gas fired plants, are saddling Europe with an ecological
predicament. Losing on both economic and ecological grounds is the worst
outcome.

Leaving the arbitration of Europe’s energy feedstock to
“market forces” is poor policy, especially if the market mechanisms are
leaving Europe dangling between U.S. coal and Russian gas. Policy
makers and corporate leaders should urgently rethink Europe’s energy
situation before it becomes a quagmire. Developing local energy sources
such as shale gas should remain on the agenda.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

The Rosenberg heading above leads into a long article.
The article is too long to reproduce here but I thought I might make a
few comments. I initially found it fascinating that the author
is an Al-Jazeera journalist with an Ashkenazi
surname.

The article is mainly a discussion of
work by our old friend Lewandowski. And it is notable that NOT
ONE climate fact is mentioned in the article. That Warmists are
desperately short of congenial facts probably explains that but it
certainly does not inspire confidence in the article. Skeptics, by
contrast usually hit you with a graph or two or some statistics at
least: An instructive difference.

Like so many Warmists,
Rosenberg refers to "the science" but never says what it is. It it
"science" that we have had no statistically significant temperature
rise in the last 17 years? From Rosenberg you would never
know.

The rationale for this strange behaviour by Warmists is
usually an appeal to authority in the best Fascist style.
Scientists trust the facts. Fascists trust authority.

And
trusting authority is so ludicrous! I am also a health
blogger and the number of occasions -- even in recent years -- when the
conventional wisdom has gone into reverse is phenomenal. The cause
of stomach ulcers, the proper treatment of snakebite, the cure for
peanut allergy, the role of dietary fat are just some of the 180 degree
turns that come into mind in medical science.

I am
suffering from a mild bout of diverticulitis at the momnent and I note
that many of the diet recommendations for us sufferers have also
recently been shown to be the reverse of the truth. See here for a list of recent dietary backflips.

What
sane person would "trust the experts" under those circumstances?
Lewandowski's central claim is that mistrust of scientific conclusions
is paranoid but I think that the cases I have just mentioned show that a
skeptical approach to accepted science is simply well-informed.
That's why skeptics use all those graphs and statistics. They are
well-informed, not paranoid.

So Rosenberg and others have built
their castles on sand. The consensus could switch overnight (as it
does at times) and they would be left washed away and with nothing to
stand on. I may even live long enough to see that happen and have a
laugh at it.

So the Rosenberg/Lewandowski theoretical edifice is
superficially a substantial and impressive one but its lack of
foundations make it no more important than medieval theology.

Local Wind Law Options

One
of the most frequent requests we get at Alliance for Wise Energy
Decisions (AWED), is for help in writing a local industrial wind energy
ordinance. (We'd appreciate your feedback if you have anything to
contribute to this issue.)

An underlying assumption of our
recommendations, is that the majority of the local legislators are
genuinely focused on what is in the best interest of: neighbors to such a
project, community businesses, and the local environment.

In
the unfortunate case where representatives have been co-opted, the basic
choices are: 1) if they are open-minded, educate them back to reality,
2) replace them with citizen-oriented people, or 3) sue them to act
responsibly [a federal section 1983 lawsuit is the most powerful option
available].

Even when the community has conscientious
representatives, an industrial Wind Energy Facility (WEF) is a unique,
highly technical matter that local legislators rarely have expertise
with. That’s the reason the WiseEnergy.org website was created: to
educate citizens and their representatives on industrial wind energy.

After
you have educated, citizen-oriented legislators, what are your
ordinance options? There are two primary ways you can go with industrial
wind energy: 1) regulate it, or 2) prohibit it. There are some
interesting options here, so let’s look at these closer...

Regulate Wind Energy —

In
North Carolina we have taken this route — and it has proven to be very
successful. The KEY premise behind this choice is that regulations are
not about excluding wind energy, but rather to provide reasonable
protections to citizens, existing businesses and the local environment. I
can not emphasize the importance of that perspective too strongly!

What
protections are reasonable? There are literally dozens of complications
from wind energy development, so we have condensed them down to the
five most important concerns that need to be properly addressed by a
local ordinance: 1) Property Value Guarantee, 2) Property Line Setbacks,
3) Noise Limits, 4) Environmental Tests, and 5) Decommissioning.

In
each of these areas, the conditions should be written based on: a)
scientific evidence, and b) legal precedent. See this discussion for
more specifics about each of the five key regulated matters.

Since
wind energy is a relatively new legal matter, there may not be a lot in
the way of case law. In that situation, our advice is to extract what
relevant material there is (maybe from other seemingly unrelated areas),
and then to forge ahead writing a law that provides protections that
are in the best interest of the community.

There are many
communities throughout the US that have written good wind regulations
(e.g. Sumner (Maine), Eddington (Maine), Sweetwater (Wyoming),
Trempealeau County (Wisconsin), Madison (Idaho), and Jackson (Maine)).

In
our view the absolute best example of a regulatory local wind ordinance
is Carteret County (NC), closely followed by the Town of Newport (NC).
Let me know any questions on either of these.

Prohibit Wind Energy: Option 1 —

One
of my other activities has been to assist my NY town in fighting off a
proposed major commercial water extraction business. Over the last ten
years the history of this is a very long story — but so far we have been
successful. Right now the town is reviewing its options for an
ordinance, and we have been ably assisted by some very competent
attorneys.

One proposal put forward is an outright prohibition of
commercial water extraction. Briefly, the recommended strategy is not
to single out that one activity, but rather to include it with a
smorgasbord of other “objectionable” business ventures — that are
defined as “prohibited uses.”

In doing some research on the
origins of this measure, it seems that it came about because a NY town
wanted to prohibit fracking. What they came up with is no small matter,
and has even gotten the attention of the NY Times.

When I first
saw this draft ordinance, I immediately thought that wind energy could
easily be inserted as one of the several prohibited items. I’ve taken
the liberty to tweak the words a bit to demonstrate how wind energy
could be incorporated, and am sharing that with you. For NYS people I
can put you in touch with the competent attorney responsible for the
original document.

Prohibit Wind Energy: Option 2 —

Under
the category of “There’s more than one way to skin a cat” you should be
aware of an organization called Community Environmental Defense Legal
Fund (CELDF). They go about addressing these types of situations
(industrial wind energy) in a completely different way.

My
layperson’s translation is that they feel that corporations (e.g. wind
developers) have usurped rights that they are not Constitutionally
entitled to.

Their strategy is to have community meetings to
educate citizens about that, and then assist them in writing a law to
protect their inherent interests.

Several communities have passed
laws prohibiting industrial wind energy (among other things). Here is a
sample story about the Town of Grafton (NH) and the accompanying CELDF
press release.

Here is the law passed by Sugar Hill (NH),
prohibiting industrial wind energy provided by outside developers. This
background document prepared for those citizens beforehand is very
instructive... The Town of Wales (NY) passed a similar law against
fracking, which could be modified to include wind energy.

The
possible downside of this approach is that the community is actually
taking on bigger (e.g. Constitutional) issues. However, it may be
appropriate, and others are doing it. For those interested, I can put
you in touch with the appropriate CELDF personnel.

This was
written from a US perspective, but even within the US, every state has
their own quirks. Whether citizens fighting wind energy are in the US or
not, there are some ideas here that can be adopted for their
circumstances.

The bottom line is that we are in a serious fight, so the more options we are aware of — and take advantage of — the better.

Email from John Droz, jr.

The eroding case against carbon dioxide

When
I hear concerns about soil erosion, I always think about my grandma.
She was an amazing woman. She grew up in Huron in the heart of the Great
Depression, which just happened to coincide with the Dust Bowl. Growing
up, my sister and I listened to her stories of dealing with the dust
storms, stuffing rags in the window sills and the cracks around the
doors in an attempt to keep the dust out of the house. Despite her best
efforts, a fine film of dust would still cover the interior of the
house.

The dust from the Dust Bowl claimed crops, cattle, and the
lives of two children in Huron. To this day, when contractors cut into
houses that survived the Dust Bowl, they find sand in between the
interior and exterior walls. The Dust Bowl eroded more than the soil; it
eroded a way of life.

Erosion is a problem that persists to this
day, and it’s responsible for dust storms, mudslides and sinkholes.
Fortunately, plants in forests, grasslands, and everywhere else set
roots in the soil and help the soil stay put, and plants around the
globe are getting a boost from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.

Although many people, spurred by the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, think “going green” means
using less carbon dioxide, plants prefer just the opposite.

We
all know plants need carbon dioxide to breathe, but many don’t know
plants turn that carbon dioxide into carbon in the form of the roots,
stems, trunks, branches, leaves, and fruit with which we are more
familiar. And according to a new study by the Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change, the more carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, the greener the planet gets.

The report, Climate
Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, published by The Heartland
Institute (where I am a research fellow), cites thousands of
peer-reviewed studies rising atmospheric CO2 levels are helping almost
all plants grow bigger, become more efficient in using water, and better
withstand the stress of high air temperature.

In a way, this CO2
enrichment of the atmosphere is to plants like an oxygen mask is to a
winded football player — helping to prepare him for the next play.

More
CO2 in the atmosphere also means plants start to grow in places they
couldn’t before, reducing the amount of erosion and, consequently, dust
in the air in places around the globe, while increasing the potential
for agriculture and wildlife habitat as the range of certain plant
species expands.

Increased levels of CO2 also have been found to
increase the fine-root density in some plants by up to 184 percent, and a
55 percent increase in above ground biomass despite water and nutrition
limitations — meaning plants become better at anchoring the soil in
place and allowing water to permeate the surface, which is especially
important during droughts.

This would have been great news for my
grandma and everyone else who survived the Dust Bowl. Improved farming
techniques have played an important part in reducing the amount of
erosion around the world, and these efforts certainly will be helped by
having more CO2 in the atmosphere. Instead of being a detriment to plant
growth, more CO2 acts as a fertilizer, making plants grow bigger,
faster, more resilient, and more abundant, greening the world we live
in.

It is amazing that something that seems as up-beat as “free” electricity from the sun can have such a dark side.

I
started covering some of the shenanigans from the solar industry last
summer when I wrote about the “Green Tea Party” in Georgia. I had no
idea what a can of worms I’d opened. In September, I wrote about the
net-metering battle taking place in Arizona—and pointed out the national
implications of what was playing out there. The following month, I
addressed, what I believe, is an organized effort by the industry, to
co-opt the language of the free-market/conservative/limited-government
thinking population in an effort to convenience them that
government-mandated and -subsidized solar energy was a good thing. Last
month I warned consumers of solar scams in a column I wrote titled
“Clouds on the solar horizon.”

I have spent months on an
investigation into the cronyism, abuse, mismanagement, and violations
involved in Abengoa Solar, the Spanish company that received $2.8
billion in taxpayer funding—most of it through the 2009 Stimulus Bill.
My exposé was published earlier this week in the Daily Caller.

Within
the past few weeks, I’ve been getting harassing phone calls from a
solar supporter—so much so, that I’ve had to block his numbers.

I’ve even earned a mention in a Cleantechnica.com post on “How To Write A Hit Piece On The Solar Industry In 6 Steps.”

Apparently
there is a perception that I am anti-solar, when in reality I wish I
could afford solar panels on my roof because I could use some “free”
electricity—but what I am, is strongly free-market. I despise government
picking winners and losers. And, my green energy investigations have
proven that solar is at the center of the corruption.

Now, I find
out that a solar advocate and employee of SunRun—one of the solar
leasing companies that Christine Lakatos and I have covered as a part of
our “Green-energy crony-corruption scandal”—has been trying to
influence Wall Street analysts in an attempt to “damage investor
confidence” in Arizona Public Service (APS). APS is the company at the
forefront of changing current netmetering policies to avoid having to
increase rates on the majority of consumers.

In an email to
Rajeev Lalwani, an energy sector analyst with Morgan Stanley, SunRun
Inc., public policy manager Kim Sanders attempts to influence Lalwani
saying: “I wanted to share a bit more info that indicates this is just
the tip of the iceberg.”

Do these people have no shame? Or, are
they behaving like desperate cornered rats, because they fear the
taxpayer-funded gravy train is about to hit the stop block?

In an
April 10 letter to SunRun Chief Executive Edward Fenster, Arizona
Corporation Commission (ACC) Chairman Bob Stump points out that Sanders’
efforts have “the potential to affect adversely millions of ratepayers
in APS territory.” Stump points out that these ratepayers are the very
people that the ACC is “charged to protect.”

Stump explains that
this is because, negatively influencing the “judgement of Wall Street
analysts” could “damage investor confidence in APS, undermine its
capacity to borrow at reasonable rates, and damage the company’s
shareholders, many of whom are Arizonans on fixed incomes and retirees.”

He
likens the behavior of the “solar advocacy community” to “bulls in
china shops” and concludes the letter stating that “such behavior”
inflicts harm to “solar in Arizona.” Stump states: “Attempts to ‘disrupt
the utility monopoly model,’ as one solar activist put it, should not
entail damaging Arizona ratepayers.”

This shameful behavior
addressed in stumps’ letter, and engaged in as revealed in my previous
reporting, on the part of the “solar advocacy community” wouldn’t be
needed if the industry could stand on its own in a true free market.

Both
consumers and regulators need to be cautious when inviting in the wolf
in sheep’s clothing that is the commercial solar industry.

George
Brandis has compared himself to Voltaire and derided proponents of
climate change action as "believers" who do not listen to opposing views
and have reduced debate to a mediaeval and ignorant level.

In an
interview with online magazine Spiked, the Attorney-General also
declares he has no regret for saying Australians have the right to be
bigots and accuses the left of advocating censorship to enforce a
morality code on the nation.

It comes as former Australian of the
year Professor Fiona Stanley said climate science had been denigrated
through politicisation and denial, and issued a stinging attack on the
federal government for the absence of a specific department to tackle
global warming.

Senator Brandis, who is driving reforms to
Australia’s racial discrimination act, describes the climate change
debate as one of the “catalysing moments” in his views on freedom of
speech.

While he says he believes in man-made climate change, the
Queensland senator tells the magazine he is shocked by the
“authoritarianism” with which some proponents of climate change exclude
alternative viewpoints, singling out Labor’s Penny Wong as “Australia’s
high priestess of political correctness”.

He said it was
“deplorable” that “one side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and
delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with
them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong”.

As
examples, he points to Senator Wong and former Prime Minister Julia
Gillard, who he accuses of arguing “the science is settled” to shut down
political debate on climate change.

“In other words, 'I am not
even going to engage in a debate with you.' It was ignorant, it was
mediaeval, the approach of these true believers in climate change,” he
said.

Senator Brandis also defended comments he made in the
Senate, where he argued for the right of Australians to be bigots as
justification for changes to section 18C and 18D of the racial
discrimination act.

“I don’t regret saying that because in this
debate, sooner or later – and better sooner than later – somebody had to
make the Voltaire point; somebody had to make the point [about]
defending the right to free speech of people with whom you profoundly
disagree.”

Senator Brandis said there had been a shift in
Australian politics, claiming it was now the “Tory point of view”,
rather than the left, that fell on the side of liberation and free
speech.

“Now, the left has adopted a reasonably comprehensive
secular morality of its own, which it now seeks to impose upon society,”
he said.

“And it’s prepared to impose that secular morality on society at the cost of the freedom of speech which it once espoused.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

18 April, 2014

Amusing: Lewandowski revisited

Stephan
Lewandowski has written two papers designed to show climate skeptics as
nutters. The first was accepted for publication in a good journal
but not actually published and the second was published but then
withdrawn. Both papers have however been readily available on the
internet for some time. The second paper was largely designed to
refute the many substantial criticisms of the first.

My
chief curiosity was not about ethical issues. I expect dishonesty
from the Green/Left -- witness the "Climategate" emails, for
instance. Rather I was interested in the central issue of data
integrity. How do they answer the challenge that their data was not a
true sample of skeptical thinking?

And their answer is
pathetic. They raise the "faking" issue at some length and
conclude: "Finally, without a priori specification of what
constitutes faked responses, the scamming hypothesis is in principle
unfalsiable: there exists no response pattern that could not be
considered "fake""

Precisely, one would think. There is no
way of rejecting the "fakery" hypothesis because there is no way of
detecting what is fake. So the data could indeed be substantially
faked. Therefore there is no guarantee that it is not fake.
The study is simply inconclusive. It proves nothing because the
genuineness of the responses cannot be guaranteed.

Faked
responses are a big issue in questionnaire and other psychological
research. I battled with that issue for 20 years in my own
psychological research. There are ways of minimizing the problem
-- all of which I used -- but in the end I concluded
that there was no solution to the problem and that survey research is
largely useless for its intended purpose. For that reason, I have
now spent another 20 years or so devoting my attention to history
instead (e.g. here and here).
History has its problems but it is my view that it tells us a lot more
about human behaviour than psychology does. And the history of
Warmism is of an unending stream of failed predictions.

But
in any case the whole Lewandowski enterprise is a huge example of
one of the informal fallacies of logic: The "Ad hominem"
fallacy. Even if he could prove his claim that skeptics are unduly
suspicious, it would not mean that they were wrong. But Warmists
rarely argue on the science. Abuse of skeptics and appeals to
authority is their "modus operandi" -- as we skeptics
repeatedly observe in our encounters with Warmists.

Climate Vacuum Cleaner

That
all the earth's grasslands and forests are already a great CO2 vacuum
cleaner the Warmists seem to have forgotten. Do they intend to
duplicate all of our grasslands and forests?

Just when we
thought the UN couldn't get any more ridiculous in its climate change
warnings and prescriptions, they exceed our expectations. According to
UPI, the third report in a series from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) "suggests vacuuming up vast amounts of CO2 from
the skies and storing it underground" as a "viable solution for
mitigating the greenhouse gas effect in the short term."

That
would have to be quite a Dirt Devil. But they're serious, they insist,
that something must be done. IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri says, "The
high speed mitigation train needs to leave the station very soon and all
of global society would need to get on board."

Uniformity or bust, that's the climate alarmists' way. But if you'll pardon the pun, we think this idea sucks.

George Reisman comments on NY Times Article "Political Rifts Slow U.S. Effort on Climate Laws"

On
April 15, the National (print) edition of The New York Times published
an article titled "Political Rifts Slow U.S. Effort on Climate Laws."
The article was inspired by the latest report of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and naively and
uncritically accepted the findings of that report as true.

It's
remarkable that the author of this article, and the authors of the IPCC
report that inspired it, can be concerned about the destructive effects
on food production and other essentials of human well-being that will
allegedly result from global warming, but do not give the slightest
thought to the destructive effects on human well-being of forcibly
imposing drastic reductions in CO2 emissions. These emissions are a
by-product of such things as the use of tractors and harvesters in food
production and of refrigerators and freezers in food preservation. They
are the result of people driving automobiles, lighting, heating, and air
conditioning their homes, and using electricity to power their
machinery and appliances. In short, CO2 emissions are a by-product of
producing and enjoying the material goods that distinguish a modern
standard of living from that of the Third World.

Preventing
government imposed reductions in the use of fossil fuels is not
something that is merely in the narrow self-interest of the oil and coal
industries. Rather it is in the self-interest of the hundreds of
millions of average people who vitally depend on the products of these
industries.

Perhaps there will someday be economical substitutes
for fossil fuels. Until then, substantially reducing the use of fossil
fuels means imposing the certainty of a drastic decline in the standard
of living of the average person in order to avoid what is at most the
possibility of some seriously bad weather.

And if we need such
things as massive sea walls to avoid such effects of that bad weather as
the flooding of coastal areas, we had better be sure that we have the
largest possible modern industrial base available to construct them.

It’s
equally remarkable that those who fear global warming have given
virtually no consideration to non-destructive ways of dealing with it,
assuming that the threat is real in the first place. Why aren’t major
prizes being offered for the development of low-cost, effective methods
of removing large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere? For example, is
it beyond us to develop plant species that will absorb vast multiples
of the CO2 that plants normally absorb? Why is the only possible
solution thought to be the destruction of modern economic life?

If
global warming is a real threat, why haven’t politicians the world over
made the negotiation of treaties for free immigration a top priority?
If it’s a serious threat, and people will not willingly deal with it by
committing economic suicide in the form of depriving themselves of the
massive amounts of energy that would be lost through such measures as
imposing a 70 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, then preparations
should be starting now to allow for the future migration of hundreds of
millions of Indians and Chinese into what will then be an inhabitable
Siberia. The United States, Mexico, and the countries of Central
America, should likewise be negotiating for free immigration into what
will then be an inhabitable central Canada. Greenland should be declared
open to all comers. Whatever the problems it may cause, global warming,
if it really comes, will also be accompanied by vast new economic
opportunities if not blocked by government migration barriers.

Or
are we to fear that the “sin” of enjoying a modern standard of living
must end in nothing less than a version of hellfire and brimstone—in the
form of the recreation on Earth of the climate conditions on the planet
Venus?

If so, what is the proof? Is it the direct observation of
another planet Earth that turned into a Venus? Or is it strings of
assumptions and inferences? And how can the Earth have had ice ages
accompanied by more than10 times the CO2 that it is supposedly on track
to experience now?

Europe’s New Energy Policy: More Coal, More Gas, More Shale, More wind

Europe
is stitching together a patchwork of measures that could reduce its
natural gas imports from Russia by over a quarter by the end of the
decade as a result of the Ukraine crisis, halting Moscow's tightening
grip over the region's energy.

Russia's seizure of Ukraine's
Crimea region has chilled political relations between Russia and the
European Union, prompting governments across the bloc to look at ways to
cut demand, find alternative supplies and switch to other fuel sources
such as coal and renewables.

Reuters calculations suggest these
steps could slash imports from Russia by around 45 billion cubic meters
(bcm) by 2020, worth $18 billion a year, equivalent to a quarter of what
Russia currently supplies.

Past hopes of loosening Moscow's grip
have been dashed, not helped by Germany's decision to give up on
nuclear power, with Russia's share of EU supplies rising 10 percentage
points to over a third since 2010, and before the current crisis
Russia's gas share in Europe was expected to remain stable at current
levels.

The crisis in Ukraine has shaken policymakers awake
across Europe's capitals, and several emergency meetings over energy
security have been held in the past weeks.

"We are serious about
reducing our energy dependency ... We need a new way to do energy
business," said European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, who
represents EU governments in Brussels.

At the forefront of these plans are Germany and Italy, Russia's biggest gas clients in the EU, but also Poland.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in late March that "energy policy will have to be newly considered".

Germany
is Europe's biggest gas user and Russia's most important customer,
using over 80 bcm of gas a year and meeting around a third of its demand
through imports from Gazprom, a share that has steadily risen over the
past 20 years.

MORE COAL AND WIND

Germany's most immediate
plans to reduce Russian gas imports are to ramp up alternative supplies
and reduce demand through improved energy efficiency.

Germany
already has something of a mountain to climb, having shut down 7
gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power in response to the nuclear meltdown
disaster in Japan in 2011, with plans by 2022 to shut down its remaining
nine reactors, which generate 12 GW, according to the World Nuclear
Association.

There appears to be no prospect of Germany reconsidering its nuclear withdrawal.

The majority of the lost capacity is planned to be filled by coal and renewable facilities.

Between
2014 and 2015, German utilities plan to connect almost 6 GW of new hard
coal power capacity to the grid and 2.7 GW of new offshore wind
installations.

It only plans to add 0.5 GW of new natural gas,
and with several older gas stations being retired, there will be a net
decline in gas use.

Similar efforts are being made in Italy,
which uses over 70 bcm of gas a year and is the EU's second biggest
importer of Russian supplies.

The Ukraine stand-off has already
put a question mark over the future of the 2,400 km (1,500 mile) South
Stream pipeline project, which will pump Russian gas to Italy later this
decade.

"The developments of the Ukraine crisis could put at
risk the construction of South Stream," Italy's Industry Minister
Federica Guidi told parliament in late March.

The head of Italian oil and gas company Eni had already warned a week earlier that the Gazprom-led project was in jeopardy.

Minister
Guidi said the government had plans to reduce energy consumption via
efficiency measures by 20 percent this decade, and that it would remove
red tape to expand its import capacity of non-Russian liquefied natural
gas (LNG) as well as complete the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) gas
corridor that will bring 10 bcm of Azeri gas to Italy towards the end of
this decade.

Guidi also said it wanted to attract investors to look for oil and gas in Italy by simplifying the permitting process.

Many Mediterranean countries are hoping to repeat the success of Israel and Cyprus in finding offshore gas.

Almost
1 trillion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas has already been
discovered in the eastern Mediterranean Levant Basin, enough to supply
Europe with gas for over two years.

Although most of the Mediterranean gas riches will end up in higher-paying Asia, Turkey and Egypt, some could also go to the EU.

Analysts also said the global LNG market would have more supplies available for Europe towards the end of the decade.

"Europe
might be just lucky enough that the global LNG market rebalances
towards the end of the decade," said Massimo Di-Odoardo, senior analyst
at energy research and consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie.

"There
are currently around 150 bcm of LNG projects under construction
globally, and we don't believe there is enough additional LNG demand
outside Europe. This means that a lot of the LNG from the Atlantic and
Middle East now being diverted to Asia will eventually come back to
Europe," he added.

POLISH AMBITIONS

The urge to reduce
Russia's energy grip is particularly keen in central Europe, where
memories of Soviet dominance are still fresh and almost all gas is
supplied by Russia.

Poland plans to start a 5 bcm per year
capacity LNG terminal by next January to import gas from overseas
countries such as Qatar and, later this decade, the United States and
Canada, where a shale gas production boom has led to a supply glut.

"Poland will never be subject to any blackmail in this respect," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said last month.

Since
2009, when Russia supplied over 91 percent of Poland's gas, Poland has
doubled the capacity of a pipeline link with Germany and built a new
link to the Czech Republic.

Despite these steps and efforts to
explore for shale gas, Poland still relies on Russian imports for
roughly two thirds of its annual gas usage of 15 billion cubic metres.

Tusk
said his government had therefore approved a new shale gas bill that
would help encourage investors by reducing red tape and regulatory
hurdles.

Poland also has plans to use more of its large domestic lignite coal reserves.

Other countries in the Baltic region are also planning to begin LNG imports soon.

Finland
and Estonia, who both import all their gas needs from Russia, signed an
agreement in late February to build two LNG terminals on either side of
the Gulf of Finland and a pipeline connecting the two countries.

Lithuania,
another Baltic country that relies entirely on Russian imports, also
plans to introduce a floating LNG facility that will allow imports of
2-4 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year from 2015.

Deeper
into southeastern Europe, where Russia's grip is also tight, U.S.
energy major Exxon Mobil and OMV Petrom plan to produce 6.5 bcm of
natural gas from Romania's Domino field by 2020.

Greenpeace isn’t anti-establishment anymore. Now it’s just another arm of the authoritarian, UN green machine

Here
in Berlin yesterday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) released the third and final section of its new climate report.
While excluded from witnessing the important, four-day meeting that
preceded it, journalists were invited to attend a press conference. So
long as they were prepared to behave like trained circus animals, that
is.

Let it never be said that UN bodies don’t thrive on
bureaucracy. You’d think it might be a straightforward matter for a
journalist such as myself who’d completed the appropriate paperwork,
submitted the right documents, and been officially accredited for a UN
climate event in Warsaw last November to gain access to yesterday’s
proceedings. But no.

As page two of this IPCC document explains,
even reporters who’d jumped through all the press accreditation hoops
two weeks ago in order to attend the Working Group 2 press conference
held in Yokohama, Japan had to start at the beginning again in order to
get through the door yesterday:

"The IPCC operates its own
registration and accreditation system, which is based on the media
accreditation guidelines of the United Nations… Media representatives
wishing to attend the Berlin press conference must register separately
for this event even if they have already registered for the Working
Group II press conference in Yokohama that was held on 31 March."

It
was the job of the large gentleman in the photograph above to prevent
non-UN-approved people – including random members of the public who also
happened to be staying at the Berlin Estrel Hotel and Convention Centre
– from trespassing on this carefully controlled, stage managed event.

"The IPCC is a totally transparent organization…Whatever we do is available for scrutiny at every stage"

is so much nonsense.

There’s
nothing friendly or cuddly about the United Nations, its organizations,
or its events. Had anyone been foolish enough to challenge the large
gentleman above, some of the numerous police officers on the premises
would no doubt have quickly come to his aid.

In any case, while
the press conference was taking place, Greenpeace was starved for
attention. For the committed souls in the photograph below, taking turns
holding signs at the side of a roadway is perhaps equivalent to
religious services on a fine Sunday morning.

It’s
important to observe that this was not a protest. There on the street,
as automobiles whizzed past, Greenpeace was delivering the exact same
‘clean energy now‘ fantasy message that IPCC officials, supported by
security personnel and police (and sponsored by the powerful, affluent,
and influential German government) were delivering inside.

Greenpeace
isn’t anti-establishment anymore. As Patrick Moore explains in
Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, it sold its soul long ago.
Now it’s just another arm of the authoritarian, UN green machine.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the summary of its fifth report. Unsurprisingly, it still blames humans as the main driver of global warming — or, climate change, climate disruption, extreme weather; whichever term you prefer. It’s unsurprising that the IPCC, an organization founded to find a way to limit human influence
on climate, would sound such an alarm. After all, if it was discovered
that nature is the main driver of the changes in climate, the IPCC would
be out of a job.

Of course, that won’t happen. After all, the science surrounding global warming is settled and there is a vast consensus. Since we are running out of time, we therefore need to act promptly, right?

Wrong. First of all, science can never be settled for it to be
called so. It took 250 years until Einstein found faults in Newton’s
theory of gravity. It took more than 150 years to find how humans evolved from apes through a DNA discovery. Even today, scientists can’t decide what caused the Black Death in Europe.

The same goes for the climate hysteria. Scientists can’t decide if it will cause more snow or less snow, record snowfalls or their total absence, if biodiversity will increase or decrease, if there will be fewer tornadoes or more, or even when the world will end if we don’t act.

Also, hurricanes have not increased in strength or number in the past 40 years. A closer look at data shows the same neutral trend since 1851; it may even go back 228 years. Furthermore, no hurricane of category three or above has made landfall in the U.S. since Wilma (October 24, 2005) — the longest stretch since 1900. The same thing goes for tornadoes since the 1950s; F3+ tornadoes are actually decreasing. Similarly, droughts are not on the rise in the U.S., despite exponential increase in CO2. California’s recent drought, for example, is not uncommon.

Polar bears are nowhere near extinction, as assessed by the Nunavut government and Inuit hunters in Northern Canada. Speaking of debunked myths, dozens of papers show that the sun drives climate, not CO2, and that petrochemical influence on climate has been blown out of proportion.
Finally, the Arctic, while it may be melting more during summer time,
refreezes so quickly that its May 1st extent hasn’t changed much since 1979. Also, the Antarctic ice has been expending since that same year.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the science is not settled,
climate change fanatics keep hammering about that supposed 97 percent
consensus among scientists. In reality, the supposed consensus is likely
overblown. It’s either based on 2008 survey of only 79 climatologists or is actually closer to 0.3 percent when one analyzes a sample of scientific papers.

Climate fanatics’ insistence on a consensus to silence debate has
some eerie traits of fascism. Indeed, only in fascist societies can
authorities make sure dissenters are silenced by whatever way they see
fit. And this is exactly what climate fanatics want; they systematically
refuse to debate
climate sceptics by snobbishly claiming they are not worthy of
recognition. People like David Suzuki, Canada’s green pope, call for
Inquisition-like censorship of skeptics. Professors like Lawrence Torcello want skeptics jailed for “criminal negligence.” Finally, Al Gore has no problem resorting to ad hominem attacks by calling skeptics “deniers” and by linking them to homophobes, racists, alcoholics, baby-eaters, etc.

Reasonable citizens should not lose any sleep over the IPCC’s latest
report or scaremongering from climate fanatics. Their catastrophic
predictions are simply a continuation of doomsday predictions Malthus started in the 19th century. And like Malthus, they have been utterly wrong, be it about agriculture, violence or the rising sea level. Climate hysteria is crumbling little by little, and like any fake science, it will collapse sooner or later.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

17 April, 2014

Unending false prophecies

With their huge record of failure, no aware person could respect the latest lot of climate disaster prognostications

The
Boston Globe noted on April 16, 2014: “The world now has a rough
deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive
action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to
forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Once again, the world is being warned of an ecological or climate “tipping point” by the UN.

In
1982, the UN issued a two decade tipping point. UN official Mostafa
Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned
on May 11, 1982, the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as
nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.”
According to Tolba in 1982, lack of action would bring “by the turn of
the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation
as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

As early
as 1989, the UN was already trying to sell their “tipping point”
rhetoric on the public. See: U.N. Warning of 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping
Point’ Began in 1989 – Excerpt: According to July 5, 1989, article in
the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United
Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year
window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the 1989
article, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could
be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global
warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and
crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening
political chaos.”

HOURS: Flashback March 2009: 'We have hours' to prevent climate disaster -- Declares Elizabeth May of Canadian Green Party

Years:
2009: NASA’s James Hansen Declared Obama Only First Term to Save The
Planet! — ‘On Jan. 17, 2009 Hansen declared Obama only ‘has four years
to save Earth’ or Flashback Oct .2009: WWF: 'Five years to save world'

Decades:
1982: UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN
Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, the 'world faces an
ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades
unless governments act now.'

Millennium: Flashback June 2010:
1000 years delay: Green Guru James Lovelock: Climate change may not
happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it
out'

It is becoming obvious that the only authentic climate "tipping point" we can rely is this one:

Flashback 2007: New Zealand Scientist on Global Warming: 'It's All Going to be a Joke in 5 Years'

Note: Romm served as the series’ Chief Science Advisor. He doesn’t mention that in his article.

Romm
also quotes “the country’s top climatologist” Michael Mann to support
his temper tantrum. Mann is also a Science Advisor for the series.
Romm didn’t mention that, either.

Romm repeatedly uses the word “they” rather than “we” to describe the film project.

The
closest he comes to transparency is near the very end of the article
when he writes, “I was not one of the producers of the show, but I have
worked with them long enough to know that that sentence sums up their
guiding philosophy.” True, he was not a “producer,” but his
statement gives the impression he merely “worked with them” in some sort
of minor, outside way. He never mentions just how central his role was
as Chief Science Advisor.

Ironic that Romm’s article title
accuses people who criticize the series as “dishonest,” yet he fails to
be forthcoming about his role in the series and his lack of objectivity
writing the article.

As soon as I saw the much discredited
Michael Mann described as "one of the country’s top climatologists", I
stopped reading. Sometimes total detachment from the facts makes
itself obvious -- JR

The good news is the video of
episode one of Showtime’s climate series, “Years Of Living Dangerously,”
has been getting great reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere.

The
bad news is the Times has published an error-riddled hit-job op-ed on
the series that is filled with myths at odds with both the climate
science and social science literature. For instance, the piece repeats
the tired and baseless claim that Al Gore’s 2006 movie “An Inconvenient
Truth” polarized the climate debate, when the peer-reviewed data says
the polarization really jumped in 2009 (see chart above from “The
Sociological Quarterly”).

As I said, “Years Of Living
Dangerously” — the landmark 9-part Showtime docu-series produced by the
legendary James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jerry Weintraub —
has been getting great reviews. Andy Revkin, often a critic of climate
messaging, wrote in the NY Times Monday:

"… a
compellingly fresh approach to showing the importance of climate hazards
to human affairs, the role of greenhouse gases in raising the odds of
some costly and dangerous outcomes and — perhaps most important —
revealing the roots of the polarizing divisions in society over this
issue…."

George Marshall, “an expert on climate and communication,” — who is also often a critic of climate messaging — wrote me:

"What impressed me about the two episodes I watched was the respect
that it showed to conservatives, evangelicals and ordinary working
people…. it is still the best documentary I have seen."

The New
York Times op-ed is from the founders of the Breakthrough Institute —
the same group where political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Senior
Fellow. It pushes the same argument that Pielke made in his
fivethirtyeight piece — which was so widely criticized and debunked that
Nate Silver himself admitted its myriad flaws and ran a debunking piece
by an MIT climate scientist.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael
Shellenberger, two widely debunked eco-critics who run The Breakthrough
Institute (TBI), begin by asserting “IF you were looking for ways to
increase public skepticism about global warming, you could hardly do
better than the forthcoming nine-part series on climate change and
natural disasters, starting this Sunday on Showtime.” But they never
cite anything other than the trailer in making their case, dismissing
the entire enterprise on the basis of 2 minutes of clips!

They
base their entire argument on a misrepresentation of climate science and
a misrepresentation of social science. They assert:

“But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global
warming simply can’t be supported by the science.”

I asked one of the country’s top climatologist, Michael Mann, to respond to that....

Genetically-modified
food which boosts health could be on British dining tables by the end
of the decade after the Government gave the green light for the first
field trial of nutrient enriched crops.

The Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today granted permission for
Rothamsted Research to grow plants enhanced with the same omega-3 fatty
acids found in fish oil, in a decision branded a 'milestone' by
scientists.

The first seeds will be sown within weeks in secure fields in Hertfordshire and will be harvested in August.

The
GM crop, where the plant's DNA has been combined with genes that
produce fish oil, is among the first of a new generation of so-called
‘nutraceuticals’ – plants whose genetic structure has been altered to
boost dietary supplements.

If successful the plant oil will be
fed to fish, such as farmed salmon, to boost their uptake, but it could
eventually be used in oils and spreads such as margarine.

Professor
Johnathan Napier, lead scientist of this project at Rothamsted
Research, said: “Omega-3 doesn’t occur in any other plant species but
there is a real pressing need for it for health reasons.

“The way that fish currently acquire their omega-3, from algae, is not sustainable. So we are trying to find another source.

“Being
able to carry out the field trial with our GM plants, means that we
have reached a significant milestone in the delivery of our research
programme.

“And just because we are talking about fish doesn’t
mean there couldn’t be lots of other applications. This is something
that could reduce our dependency on fish or supplements in the long
term.”

Omega-3 fatty acids have been widely linked to health
benefits, such as lowering the risk of heart disease, cancers and
neuro-degenerative diseases.

Although omega-3 is often described
as fish oil, it is in fact made by microscopic marine algae that are
eaten or absorbed by fish.

Farmed fish grown in cages are unable
to absorb sufficient omega-3 in their diets so they have to be fed on
smaller fish which critics claim is unsustainable.

The Rothamsted
Research scientists have copied and synthesised the genes from the
algae and then spliced them into a plant called ‘Camelina sativa’, known
as “false flax”, which is widely grown for its seed oil.

Although
the main aim of the research is to produce GM crops that could be made
into food for farmed fish, the seeds could eventually be used in other
foods, such as margarine.

It is the first crop to be given
permission since a wide-ranging report, commissioned by the government,
gave the green light to GM in March.

Sir Mark Walport, the
government’s Chief Scientific Advisor recommended that Britain should
begin production after finding GM crops were not only safe, but more
nutritious than current crops.

GM crops are already widely used
in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and India. Around 85 per cent of
all corn crops in the US are now GM.

Sir Mark has warned that Britain risks falling behind if it does not begin GM production soon.

"Diets with high omega-3 are
strongly associated with health and protection from a range of chronic
diseases including cardiovascular diseases,

"Cultivation of crops
that produce oils high in omega 3 offers a sustainable supply of these
health beneficial products for the first time.”

Prof Jackie
Hunter, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
research Council, which is helping fund the research said: "This
research is seeking to provide an alternative source of omega-3 oil for
the aquaculture industry that is seeking new ways to maintain and
increase its sustainability.

“After many years of laboratory
research this project has reached the point where only a field trial
will show scientists if this could work in real world conditions.”

However
anti GM critics claim that omega-3 fish oils have been implicated in
raising the risk of prostate cancer, and it is not clear whether
GM-derived fish oils will be safe for human or animal consumption.

According
to the World Health Organisation’s recent report, ‘Night Noise
Guidelines for Europe’ [1], environmental noise is emerging as one of
the major public health concerns of the twenty-first century. It
observes that, “Many people have to adapt their lives to cope with the
noise at night,” and the young and the old are particularly vulnerable.

This
is because hearing in young people is more acute and, in older people, a
loss of hearing of higher sound frequencies renders them more
susceptible to the effects of low frequency noise. It is a particularly
troublesome feature of the noise generated by wind turbines due to its
impulsive, intrusive and incessant nature.

A recent case-control
study conducted around two wind farms in New England has shown [2] that
subjects living within 1.4 km of an IWT had worse sleep, were sleepier
during the day, and had poorer SF36 Mental Component Scores compared to
those living further than 1.4 km away. The study demonstrated a strongly
significant association between reported sleep disturbance and ill
health in those residing close to industrial wind turbines.

The
major adverse health effects caused seem to be due to sleep disturbance
and deprivation with the main culprits identified as loud noise in the
auditory range, and low frequency noise, particularly infrasound. This
is inaudible in the conventional sense, and is propagated over large
distances and penetrates the fabric of dwellings, where it may be
amplified. It is a particular problem at night, in the quiet rural
settings most favoured for wind farms, because infrasound persists long
after the higher frequencies have been dissipated.

Sleep is a
physiological necessity and the sleep-deprived are vulnerable to a
variety of health problems [2,3]. particularly Cardiovascular Disease in
which nocturnal noise is an important factor [4]. Sleep deprivation in
children is associated with increased bodyweight [3,5], which is known
to ‘track’ into later life, and predisposes to adult disease. That is
why “Encouraging more sleep” is a sensible target in the Public health
Agency’s current campaign to prevent obesity in children. It also causes
memory impairment because memories are normally reinforced in the
later, Rapid Eye Movement, phase of sleep; again, it is the young and
the old who are most affected. Sleep deprivation is associated with an
increased likelihood of developing a range of chronic diseases including
Type II Diabetes, cancer (eg breast with shift work [6]), Coronary
Heart Disease [7,8] and Heart Failure [9]. Although the
quality of the data are mixed, those on Heart Failure reported recently
from the HUNT Study [9] are quite robust as they are based on 54,279
Norwegians free of disease at baseline (men and women aged 20-89 years).
A total of 1412 cases of Heart Failure developed over a mean follow-up
of 11.3 years. A dose-dependent relationship was observed between the
risk of disease and the number of reported insomnia symptoms: i)
Difficulty in initiating sleep; ii) Difficulty in maintaining sleep;
and, iii) Lack of restorative sleep. The Hazard Ratios were ‘0’ for none
of these; ‘0.96’ for one; ‘1.35’ for two; and, ‘4.53’ for three; this
achieved significance at the 2% level. This means that such a result
could occur once by chance if the study were to be repeated 50 times,
Significance is conventionally accepted at the 5% level.

Another
important, recent study is MORGEN which followed nearly 18,000 Dutch men
and women, free of Cardiovascular Disease at baseline, over 10-14 years
[8]. In this period there were 607 events: fatal CVD, non-fatal
Myocardial Infarction and Stroke. Adequate sleep, defined as at least
seven hours, was a protective factor which augmented the benefits
conferred by the absence of four traditional cardiovascular risk
factors. For example, the benefit of adequate sleep equalled the
protective contribution of not smoking cigarettes. Given that cigarette
smoking is such a potent risk factor for Cardiovascular Disease, this
result is striking. The findings built on earlier ones from the MORGEN
study [7]. It seems that adequate sleep is important in protecting
against a range of Cardiovascular Diseases which result when arteries of
different sizes are compromised: large (coronary, cerebral) arteries in
heart attacks and stroke, small arteries (arterioles) in heart failure.

All
of these studies share the weakness that they are ‘observational’ as
opposed to ‘experimental’ and, as such, their results do not constitute
‘proof.’ We now have the evidence of an experimental study carried out
in human volunteers which shows that the expression of a large range of
genes is affected by sleep deprivation of fairly short duration [10].
This might be the key to understanding why the health effects of sleep
deprivation are so diverse. It could also shed light on the ‘Wind
Turbine Syndrome,’ a cluster of symptoms which include sleep
disturbance, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, nausea, changes in mood and
inability to concentrate [11]. In this condition infrasound is a likely
causal agent.

This group has now shown in another small
intervention study that mistimed sleep desynchronized from the central
circadian clock has a much larger effect on the circadian regulation of
the human transcriptome (i.e., a reduction in the number of circadian
transcripts from 6.4% to 1% and changes in the overall time course of
expression of 34% of transcripts) [12]. This may elucidate the reasons
for the large excess of cardiovascular events associated with shift work
found in a meta-analysis of over 2 million subjects in 34 studies [13].
The results demonstrate that any interference in normal sleeping
patterns is inimical to cardiovascular health.

The old admonition
that ‘What you can’t hear won’t harm you,’ sadly isn’t true. It is now
known that organ of Corti in the cochlea (inner ear) contains two types
of sensory cells: one row of inner hair cells which are responsible for
hearing; and, three rows of outer hair cells which are more responsive
to low frequency sound [14]. The infrasound produced by wind turbines is
transduced by the outer hair cells and transmitted to the brain by Type
II afferent fibres. The purpose is unclear as it results in sleep
disturbance. Perhaps it served some vital function in our evolutionary
past which has persisted to our detriment today? In fact, many animals
use infrasound for communication and navigation. This could well have a
genetic basis as it is only a minority, albeit a sizable one, which is
affected. This may well be the group which is also liable to travel
sickness. Schomer et al have now advanced the theory that as wind
turbines increase in size they increasingly emit infrasound with a
frequency below 1Hz (CPS) [15]. Below this frequency the otoliths in the
inner ear respond in an exaggerated way in a susceptible minority who
will suffer symptoms of the Wind Farm Syndrome. Previously it was
thought that the brain was only under the control of electrical and
biochemical stimuli but there is new evidence that it is sensitive, in
addition, to mechanical stimuli [16].

The problem of infrasound
and low frequency noise was well-recognised in a report by Casella
Stanger [17], commissioned by DEFRA in 2001, and since ignored: “For
people inside buildings with windows closed, this effect is exacerbated
by the sound insulation properties of the building envelope. Again mid
and high frequencies are attenuated to a much greater extent than low
frequencies.” It continued: “As the A-weighting network attenuates low
frequencies by a large amount, any measurements made of the noise should
be with the instrumentation set to linear.” It drew heavily upon the
DOE’s Batho Report of 1990 [18]. In fact, these problems had already
been elucidated and the measurement issues addressed in a trio of papers
by Kelley (et al) in the 1980s [19-21]. This research again has been
ignored or forgotten so the problem continues to be seriously
underestimated. When measured using a tool which can detect it, levels
of infrasound and low frequency noise are disturbingly high, with ‘sound
pressure levels’ greater than previously thought possible [22].

There
are a number of other adverse effects associated with sleep
deprivation. Tired individuals are more likely to have road traffic
accidents and injure themselves while operating machinery. In addition,
wind turbines can, and do, cause accidents by collapsing, blade snap,
ice throw, and even going on fire. They induce stress and psychological
disorder from blade flicker, which also has implications for certain
types of epilepsy and autism. Even the current planning process, with
its virtual absence of consultation, is stress inducing, as is the
confrontation between land owners, who wish to profit from erecting
turbines, and their neighbours who dread the effects. Finally, wind
turbines considerably reduce the value of dwellings nearby and this has a
negative long term effect on their owners’ and their families’ health
[23]. On top of this, increasing numbers of families will be driven into
fuel poverty by spiralling electricity costs which are subsidising wind
energy. It is galling that SSE’s current, seductive advertising
campaign is being supported from these sources.

‘Wind Turbine
Noise’ was reviewed in an editorial in the British Medical Journal in
2012 [24]. The authors concluded that “A large body of evidence now
exists to suggest that wind turbines disturb sleep and impair health at
distances and noise levels that are permitted in most jurisdictions.”
This remains the case today. The Public Health Agency has dismissed this
editorial as falling short of a ‘systematic review,’ which is fair
enough, given the constraints of the format, yet ignores at least one,
excellent, recent systematic review [23]. Interestingly, that review
records the fact that in 1978 the British Government was found guilty in
a case taken to Europe by the Irish Government of applying five
techniques, including subjection to noise and deprivation of sleep.
These were used in Ulster to ‘encourage’ admissions and to elicit
information from prisoners and detainees. They amounted to humiliating
and degrading treatment, ie torture [23].

Two
months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was
delivered to The Washington Post demanding a ban on any article
questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before
publication of my column, which consisted of precisely that heresy.

The
column ran as usual. But I was gratified by the show of intolerance
because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a
new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win the
debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse
any and all opposition.

The proper word for that attitude is
totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious
consequences -- from social ostracism to vocational defenestration --
upon those who refuse to be silenced.

Sometimes the word comes
from on high, as when the president of the United States declares the
science of global warming to be "settled." Anyone who disagrees is then
branded "anti-science." And better still, a "denier" -- a brilliantly
chosen calumny meant to impute to the climate skeptic the opprobrium
normally reserved for the hatemongers and crackpots who deny the
Holocaust.

Then last week, another outbreak. The newest closing
of the leftist mind is on gay marriage. Just as the science of global
warming is settled, so, it seems, are the moral and philosophical merits
of gay marriage.

To oppose it is nothing but bigotry, akin to
racism. Opponents are to be similarly marginalized and shunned,
destroyed personally and professionally.

Like the CEO of Mozilla
who resigned under pressure just 10 days into his job when it was
disclosed that six years earlier he had donated to California's
Proposition 8, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

But
why stop with Brendan Eich, the victim of this high-tech lynching? Prop
8 passed by half a million votes. Six million Californians joined Eich
in the crime of "privileging" traditional marriage. So did Barack Obama.
In that same year, he declared that his Christian beliefs made him
oppose gay marriage.

Yet under the new dispensation, this is
outright bigotry. By that logic, the man whom the left so ecstatically
carried to the White House in 2008 was equally a bigot.

The whole
thing is so stupid as to be unworthy of exegesis. There is no logic.
What's at play is sheer ideological prejudice -- and the enforcement of
the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to
be closed.

To this magic circle of forced conformity, the left
would like to add certain other policies, resistance to which is deemed a
"war on women." It's a colorful synonym for sexism. Leveling the charge
is a crude way to cut off debate.

Thus, to oppose late-term
abortion is to make war on women's "reproductive health." Similarly, to
question Obamacare's mandate of free contraception for all.

Some
oppose the regulation because of its impingement on the free exercise of
religion. Others on the simpler (non-theological) grounds of a skewed
hierarchy of values. Under the new law, everything is covered, but a few
choice things are given away free. To what does contraception owe its
exalted status? Why should it rank above, say, antibiotics for a sick
child, for which that same mother must co-pay?

Say that, however, and you are accused of denying women "access to contraception."

Or
try objecting to the new so-called Paycheck Fairness Act for women,
which is little more than a full-employment act for trial lawyers. Sex
discrimination is already illegal. What these new laws do is relieve the
plaintiffs of proving intentional discrimination. To bring suit, they
need only to show that women make less in that workplace.

Like the White House, where women make 88 cents to the men's dollar?

That's
called "disparate impact." Does anyone really think Obama consciously
discriminates against female employees, rather than the disparity being a
reflection of experience, work history, etc.? But just to raise such
questions is to betray heretical tendencies.

The good news is
that the "war on women" charge is mostly cynicism, fodder for
campaign-year demagoguery. But the trend is growing. Oppose the current
consensus and you're a denier, a bigot, a homophobe, a sexist, an enemy
of the people.

Long a staple of academia, the totalitarian
impulse is spreading. What to do? Defend the dissenters, even if --
perhaps, especially if -- you disagree with their policy. It is -- it
was? -- the American way.

The
world is filled with hate and if you cannot be respectful of other
peoples views you can help foster more hatred and anger. This is
especially true when you talk about our energy future.

There are
many people that believe in man-made “Global Warming” and “Climate
Change” and believe there is only one way to avert these crises and that
is with renewable energy technology. No other technology can be
discussed as a solution, because if you do, then you are a pawn for the
big money behind that respective technology.

Can we all grow-up and have a rational discussion on energy without calling each other names?

Oberlin,
Ohio is home to Oberlin college with some of the best and brightest
students in America attending this small school. While it is a small
school, it ranks right up there with Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in
cost and in quality of education. It is also known as having one of the
most green conscious and liberal student bodies in America.

Oberlin
college is a perfect example of where, if paranoia and name calling is
put aside, that both the ultra-right and ultra-left can come together on
an issue like thorium based MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors). I know, I have
experienced rationale debate on campus first hand.

A popular
restaurant with college students is the Feve, and when in town, I like
to go to the upstairs bar and strike up a conversation on energy with
some of the students or faculty. This is normally very easy to do and
students love to share their views.

I respect the position of the
people that believe in man-made Global Warming and the renewables
solution, I just ask if they have thought it all the way through (I am a
man-made global warming skeptic and I do not believe that wind and
solar are a solution to our environmental problems). I am very careful
in my discussion, as I know the words that will shut them down and cause
them to close their minds to any further debate. Words like
“intermittency” and “on-demand” are not things a person with a vastly
different viewpoint wants to hear.

I normally start the conversation as such:

Because
our current electrical grid has to work with other technologies,
natural gas peaker plants have grown by leaps and bounds with the
addition of solar and wind. These peaker plants are cleaner than coal
but are less clean than baseload natural gas plants. The natural gas
peaker plants act as a compliment to wind and solar to stabilize the
grid. The question I ask is, “Do the peaker natural gas plants put out
more CO2 running in compliment with the wind turbines they support than
what a natural gas baseload and/or a nuclear power plant does to create
the same amount of energy?”

Many students cannot answer this question with any certainty.

I then start to talk about the benefits of MSRs and LFTR and there is a lot of push back.

At
Oberlin college there are a lot of students there that are
anti-fracking advocates and so, while natural gas burns cleaner, they do
not necessarily like natural gas. Solutions that they like are natural
gas made from bio-digesters and natural gas from landfill to support
wind and solar. More times than naught, when nuclear is mentioned, you
get looked at as if you have a third eye. After much discussion I
challenge them to watch three documentaries. The first documentary is
“Cool It!” by Bjorn Lomborg, an environmentalist and a big believer in
global warming. The unbiased review of all energy technologies by Dr.
Scott Tinker in the “Switch Energy Project” and finally “Pandoras
Promise” by director Robert Stone. After watching these three films, it
has been my experience, that even the most vitriolic anti-nuclear
opponents have warmed to nuclear energy.

Getting a college
student to watch a documentary in their free time is hard but the
”Cool It!” documentary draws them in and, dare I say, helps to form a
bridge between the left and the right. Many times if you get someone to
watch “Cool It!” they will watch the other two documentaries. “Cool It!”
is available on iTunes and “Pandora’s Promise” is available on iTunes
and on Netflix.

Kirk Sorensen’s “TED talks” and Dr. Robert
Hargraves “Aim High” video seals the deal and gets them so enamored with
thorium that I get students that will call me telling me they have
discovered yet another of Gordon McDowell’s videos.

Now, when I
go to the Feve, a lot more people know about thorium energy and MSRs,
not from me, but from other student advocates. They still believe in
man-made global warming and climate change and that is okay with me.
They also believe that wind and solar are part of the solution and that
is okay with me. But now, instead of a vitriolic hatred for nuclear
energy, they see it as having a dominant and substantial role in our
future.

Tom
Friedman, a NY Times' columnist, is also Jewish. According to his
Wiki-ography, he "attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar
Mitzvah… He became enamored of Israel after a visit there in December
1968, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on
Kibbutz Hahotrim, near Haifa. He has characterized his high school years
as 'one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.' "

So
it was a little surprising to hear Friedman call global-warming
skeptics "climate deniers" in a recent interview with CNN's Fareed, in
reference to the latest report by the UN's IPCC. Friedman says,

"I was thinking, driving over here, what if the nightmare of the
climate deniers came true and we really decided in America to take this
seriously and act? What would we do? What is the nightmare that would
happen?"

This comes on the heels of the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) denouncing Dr. Roy Spencer for calling climate-change alarmists
"global-warming Nazis", his response to the continued and explicit use
of the word "denier" by pundits like Friedman. Spencer wrote:

"I
am calling out the ADL for not denouncing the widespread use of Nazi
Holocaust imagery in public statements made by journalists, politicians,
and even some scientists over the last 7+ years towards us global
warming skeptics. … The ADL would appear to have decided (based upon
their years of silence) that using Holocaust imagery is OK on one side
of the global warming issue, but not the other."

With the ADL
remaining silent on the issue since 2007, when the term global-warming
denier was first used by Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe, don't expect
too much protestation over Friedman's intentional choice of words. As
Charles Krauthammer recently wrote in the Washington Post,

"Anyone who disagrees is then branded "anti-science" and, better still,
a "denier" — a brilliantly chosen calumny meant to impute to the
climate skeptic the opprobrium normally reserved for the hatemongers and
crackpots who deny the Holocaust."

Shelley Rose wrote the following back in late February:

"It has become too common to use comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazi
imagery to attack people with opposing views, whether the issue is
global warming, immigration or stem-cell research. The six million
Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Hitler deserve better.
Their deaths should not be used for political points or sloganeering.
This type of comparison diminishes and trivializes the Holocaust. There
is no place for it in civil discussions."

The only thing worse
than a Jewish person calling someone a 'climate denier' are the crickets
coming from the ADL, which has chosen to remain silent on this
despicable means of discourse.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

16 April, 2014

The Science And Politics Of Climate Change

Lennart
Bengtsson says that the science isn’t settled and we still don’t know
how best to solve the energy problems of our planet. Article originally
published in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a major Swiss
newspaper. Lennart Bengtsson was until 1990 Director of the Max Planck
Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. After his retirement, he has led,
among others, the Department of Earth Sciences at the International
Space Science Institute in Bern

Since the end of the 19th
century, we have known that the Earth’s climate is sensitive to
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At that time, the Swedish chemist
Svante Arrhenius showed that an increase in CO2 concentrations would
lead to a warmer climate. However, Arrhenius harbored little hope that
this would happen. Consequently, the Swedes would have to continue to
suffer in a cold and miserable climate. Since then, much has changed.
Annual CO2 emissions have now reached a level that is about 20 times
higher than that of 1896. This has caused concern worldwide.

More
CO2 in the atmosphere leads undoubtedly to a warming of the earth
surface. However, the extent and speed of this warming are still
uncertain, because we cannot yet separate well enough the greenhouse
effect from other climate influences. Although the radiative forcing by
greenhouse gases (including methane, nitrogen oxides and fluorocarbons)
has increased by 2.5 watts per square meter since the mid-19th century,
observations show only a moderate warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius. Thus,
the warming is significantly smaller than predicted by most climate
models. In addition, the warming in the last century was not uniform.
Phases of manifest warming were followed by periods with no warming at
all or even cooling.

The complex and only partially understood
relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming leads to a
political dilemma. We do not know when to expect a warming of 2 degrees
Celsius. The IPCC assumes that the earth will warm up by 1.5 to 4.5
degrees Celcius in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration. These
high values of climate sensitivity, however, are not supported by
observations. In other words: global warming has not been a serious
problem so far if we rely on observations. It is only a problem when we
refer to climate simulations by computer models.

There is no
alternative to such computer simulations if one wants to predict future
developments. However, since there is no way to validate them, the
forecasts are more a matter of faith than a fact. The IPCC has published
its expert opinion a few months ago and presented it in the form of
probabilities. As long as the results cannot be supported by validated
models they produce a false impression of reliability.

EU member
states pursue a strategy of reducing the climate risk by reducing the
use of fossil fuels in the shortest time to a minimum. Many citizens are
risk averse and therefore support this policy. In addition, many
citizens want to phase-out nuclear power, because it is also seen as too
risky. To eliminate both nuclear energy as well as fossil fuels is an
enormous challenge. Nevertheless, Germany and Switzerland have opted for
such an energy transition. To pursue such a radical and perhaps risky
energy policy, despite the limited economic, scientific and technical
capabilities of the two countries is an enormous undertaking.

There
are two things that need to be addressed in this context. Firstly, such
energy transitions will, unfortunately, do little to reduce global CO2
emissions, since 90 percent of these emissions come from countries
outside Europe. Many of these countries are likely to increase their CO2
emissions in the future, as their population increases and their top
priority is to improve the living standards of their citizens. China is a
special case. Its CO2 emissions have more than doubled in the last
decade and are now about 50 percent higher than those of the United
States. For various reasons, there are no alternatives to fossil fuels
in the developing countries for the time being. Energy demand there is
great. Currently, 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity. To
reduce their own emissions easily and quickly, the OECD countries have
outsourced some of their energy-intensive production to developing
countries. In the national statistics, this looks good. Globally,
however, not much changes, since the emissions occur simply somewhere
else.

Secondly, the rapid transition to renewable energy has led
to a considerable increase in energy prices in many countries,
especially in Europe. This weakens the competitiveness and leads to a
relocation of energy-intensive industries to countries such as the USA,
where the energy price has dropped significantly by the use of shale
gas.

It is no surprise that there are other forces that are
driving rapid change. Because once government subsidies are involved,
huge profits are available. However, before radical and hasty changes to
the current energy system are implemented, there must be robust
evidence that climate change is significantly detrimental. We are still
far away from such evidence. It would be wrong to conclude from the
report of the IPCC and similar reports that the science is settled.

We
do not yet know how best to solve the energy problems of our planet.
But many things can happen in the next 100 years. A moderate climate
sensitivity, as suggested by recent observations, could provide the
world a breathing space of about half a century (but not much longer) if
at the same a switch from coal to natural gas occurs. This gives us the
opportunity to avoid unnecessary and panicked investment, and to invest
the available resources in well thought-out and long-term oriented
research programs instead. These include new types of nuclear energy as
well as the use of nuclear waste to generate energy.

Two
California companies, Sequoia Pacific Solar and Eiger Lease Co., are
suing the Treasury for withholding $14.6 million in cash grants after
the parent company, SolarCity, burned through $244 million in tax
incentives dating back to 2009. Despite the quarter billion in taxpayer
dollars, all they have to show for it is a whopping $166 million in
debt. No wonder they're desperate.

According to the lawsuit,
Treasury “improperly changed the rules.” Federal officials, however, say
that SolarCity inflated sales contracts to retrieve more taxpayer
dollars. They're also accused of deceiving its shareholders and
releasing erroneous financial reports.

The fact the feds are
providing “green” incentives at all is ridiculous enough, especially in
the wake of boondoggles like Solyndra. But as Hot Air's Jazz Shaw adds,
“is this a private company which is intended to show a profit in the
marketplace or a non-profit charity which is only expected to live off
the teat of the taxpayer? Well, okay… the 'non-profit' part is probably
pretty obvious.”

It's
spring, and that means allergies. So naturally, alarmists are
attempting to identify a link between heavy pollen and global “warming.”
For most of the country, a continued cool pattern has delayed the
allergy season. “With temperatures finally starting to rise, New Jersey
may soon experience a compressed spring, causing an allergy season
that's supercharged,” says Christopher Maag of North Jersey.com.

He
later adds: “Erratic weather changes and intense pollen seasons are
consistent with research on global climate change by Leonard Bielory, an
allergist and visiting professor at the Rutgers Center for
Environmental Prediction. In a study presented last year … Bielory
predicted that annual pollen counts in many parts of the U.S., including
New Jersey, will double between the years 2000 and 2040 as higher
average temperatures bring longer pollination seasons.”

Perhaps
Maag should examine his own contradiction. Bielory cites “longer
pollination seasons” thanks to “higher average temperatures,” while
Maag's entire premise is on a “compressed” and “supercharged” season
shortened by cold weather. Also, earth hasn't warmed in over 17 years.
That's nothing to sneeze at.

The
story of rancher Cliven Bundy has captured an abundance of media
attention and attracted supporters from across the West, who relate to
the struggle against the federal management of lands. Bundy’s sister,
Susan, was asked: “Who’s behind the uproar?” She blamed the Sierra Club,
then Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), and then President Obama. She concluded
her comments with: “It’s all about control” — a sentiment that is
frequently expressed regarding actions taken in response to some
endangered-species claim.

An Associated Press report describes
Bundy’s battle this way: “The current showdown pits rancher Cliven
Bundy’s claims of ancestral rights to graze his cows on open range
against federal claims that the cattle are trespassing on arid and
fragile habitat of the endangered desert tortoise.”

Bundy’s story
has been percolating for decades — leaving people to question why now.
The pundits are, perhaps, missing the real motive. To discover it, you
have to dig deep under the surface of the story, below the surface of
the earth. I posit: it is all about oil and gas.

On April 10, the
Natural News Network posted this: “BLM fracking racket exposed! Armed
siege and cattle theft from Bundy ranch really about fracking leases.”
It states: “a Natural News investigation has found that BLM is actually
in the business of raking in millions of dollars by leasing Nevada lands
to energy companies that engage in fracking operations.”

This
set off alarms in my head; it didn’t add up. I know that oil-and-gas
development and ranching can happily coexist. Caren Cowan, executive
director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, told me: “The
ranching and oil-and-gas communities are the backbone of America. They
are the folks who allow the rest of the nation to pursue their hearts’
desire secure in the knowledge that they will have food and energy
available in abundant supply. These natural resource users have worked
arm-in-arm for nearly a century on the same land. They are constantly
developing and employing technologies for ever better outcomes.”

The
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wouldn’t be enduring the humiliating
press it has received, as a result of kicking Bundy off of land his
family has ranched for generations and taking away his prior usage
rights, just to open up the land for oil-and-gas — the two can both be
there.

The Natural News “investigation” includes a map from the
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology that shows “significant exploratory
drilling being conducted in precisely the same area where the Bundy
family has been running cattle since the 1870s.” It continues: “What’s
also clear is that oil has been found in nearby areas.”

Nevada is
not a top-of-mind state when one thinks about oil and gas. Alan Coyner,
administrator for the Nevada Division of Minerals, describes his state:
“We are not a major oil-producing state. We’re not the Saudi Arabia of
the U.S. like we are for gold and geothermal production.” The Las Vegas
Review Journal reports: “When it comes to oil, Nevada is largely
undiscovered country…. fewer than 1,000 wells have been drilled in the
state, and only about 70 are now in production, churning out modest
amounts of low-grade petroleum generally used for tar or asphalt. Since
an all-time high of 4 million barrels in 1990, oil production in Nevada
has plummeted to fewer than 400,000 barrels a year. More oil is pumped
from the ground in one day in North Dakota — where the fracking boom has
added more than 2,000 new wells in recent years — than Nevada produced
in 2012.”

But, Nevada could soon join the ranks of the states
that are experiencing an economic boom and job creation due to
oil-and-gas development. And, that has got to have the environmental
groups, which are hell-bent on stopping it, in panic mode. Until now,
their efforts in Nevada have been focused on blocking big solar
development.

A year ago, the BLM held an oil-and-gas lease sale
in Reno. At the sale, 29 federal land leases, totaling about 56 square
miles, were auctioned off, bringing in $1.27 million. One of the winning
bidders is Houston-based Noble Energy, which plans to drill as many as
20 exploratory wells and could start drilling by the end of the year.
Commenting on its acreage, Susan Cunningham, Noble senior vice
president, said: “We’re thrilled with the possibilities of this
under-explored petroleum system.”

The parcels made available in
April 2013 will be developed using hydraulic fracturing, about which
Coyner quipped: “If the Silver State’s first big shale play pays off, it
could touch off a fracking rush in Nevada.” Despite the fact that
fracking has been done safely and successfully for more than 65 years in
America, the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Nevada-based
senior scientist, Ron Mrowka, told the Las Vegas Review Journal:
“Fracking is not a good thing. We don’t feel there is a safe way to do
it.”

The BLM made the leases available after someone, or some
company, nominated the parcels, and the process to get them ready for
auction can easily take a year or longer. One year before the April
2013, sale, CBD filed a “60-day notice of intent to sue” the BLM for its
failure to protect the desert tortoise in the Gold Butte area — where
Bundy cattle have grazed for more than a century.

Because
agencies like the BLM are often staffed by environmental sympathizers,
it is possible that CBD was alerted to the pending potential oil-and-gas
boom when the April 2013 parcels were nominated—triggering the notice
of intent to sue in an attempt to lock up as much land as possible
before the “fracking rush” could begin.

A March 25, 2014 CBD
press release — which reportedly served as the impetus for the current
showdown — states: “Tortoises suffer while BLM allows trespass cattle to
eat for free in Nevada desert.” It points out that the Clark County
Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan purchased and then retired
grazing leases to protect the endangered tortoise.

Once Bundy’s
cattle are kicked off the land to protect the tortoise, the precedent
will be set to use the tortoise to block any oil-and-gas development in
the area — after all environmentalists hate cattle only slightly less
than they hate oil and gas. Admittedly, the April 13 leases are not in
the same area as Bundy’s cattle, however, Gold Butte does have some
oil-and-gas exploration that CBD’s actions could nip in the bud.
Intellihub reports: “The BLM claims that they are seizing land to
preserve it, for environmental protection. However, it is obvious that
environmental protection is not their goal if they are selling large
areas of land to fracking companies. Although the land that was sold
last year is 300 and some miles away from the Bundy ranch, the
aggressive tactics that have been used by federal agents in this
situation are raising the suspicion that this is another BLM land grab
that is destined for a private auction.”

The Natural News Network
also sees that the tortoise is being used as a scapegoat: “Anyone who
thinks this siege is about reptiles is kidding themselves.” It adds:
“‘Endangered tortoises’ is merely the government cover story for
confiscating land to turn it over to fracking companies for millions of
dollars in energy leases.” The Network sees that it isn’t really about
the critters; after all, hundreds of desert tortoises are being
euthanized in Nevada.

Though the Intellihub and Natural News
Network point to the “current showdown” as being about allowing
oil-and-gas development, I believe that removing the cattle is really a
Trojan horse. The tortoise protection will be used to block any more
leasing.

On April 5, 2014, CBD sent out a triumphant press release announcing that the “long-awaited” roundup of cattle had begun.

What
I am presenting is only a theory; I am just connecting some dots. But
over-and-over, an endangered or threated species or habitat is used to
block all kinds of economic development. A few weeks ago, I wrote about
the lesser prairie chicken and the huge effort ($26 million) a variety
of industries cooperatively engaged in to keep its habitat from being
listed as threatened. The effort failed and the chicken’s habitat was
listed. In my column on the topic, I predicted that these listings were
likely to trigger another sage brush rebellion that will challenge
federal land ownership. The Bundy showdown has brought the controversy
front and center.

For now, southern Nevada’s last rancher has won
the week-long standoff that has been likened to Tiananmen Square.
Reports state that “the BLM said it did so because it feared for the
safety of employees and members of the public,” not because it has
changed its position.

While this chapter may be closing, it may
have opened the next chapter in the sage brush rebellion. The Bundy
standoff has pointed out the overreach of federal agencies and the use
of threatened or endangered species to block economic activity.

"The
heavens reek, the waters below are foul ... we are in a crisis of
survival." That's how Walter Cronkite and CBS hyped the first Earth Day,
back in 1970. Somehow we've survived since then, and most of life got
better, although I never hear that from the worrywarts.

Of
course, some things got better because of government: We passed
environmental rules that got most of the filth out of the air and sewage
out of lakes and rivers. Great -- but now we're told that we're in big
trouble because greenhouse gases cause global warming. I mean, climate
change.

"Crop yields are down, deaths from heat are up," says the
Los Angeles Times. The "Worst Is Yet to Come," warns The New York
Times. This hype is not new. Alarmists always fool the gullible media.
They once fooled me.

A few years back, we were going to be killed
by global cooling , overpopulation, pesticide residues, West Nile
virus, bird flu, Y2K, cellphone radiation, mad cow disease, etc. Now
it's global warming.

Reporters don't make these scares up. The
recent hype about global warming comes from the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. Most of its members are serious scientists. But
reporters don't realize that those scientists, like bird flu
specialists, have every incentive to hype the risk. If their computer
models (which so far have been wrong) predict disaster, they get
attention and money. If they say, "I'm not sure," they get nothing.

Also,
the IPCC is not just a panel of scientists. It's an intergovernmental
panel. It's a bureaucracy controlled by the sort of people who once ran
for student council and are "exhilarated by the prospect of putting the
thumb of the federal government on the scale."

Actually, that
wasn't a quote from a global warming alarmist. It's from anti-marijuana
alarmist and former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joe
Califano. But it's the same crisis mindset. Scientists who disagree, who
are reluctant to put their thumbs on the government scale, don't feel
welcome in the IPCC.

It's possible climate change may become a
problem. But even if industrialization brings warming, we've got more
important problems. On my TV show this week, statistician Bjorn Lomborg
points out that "air pollution kills 4.3 million people each year ... We
need to get a sense of priority." That deadly air pollution happens
because, to keep warm, poor people burn dung in their huts.

Yet,
time and again, environmentalists oppose the energy production most
likely to make the world cleaner and safer. Instead, they persuade
politicians to spend billions of your dollars on symbolism like
"renewable" energy.

"The amazing number that most people haven't
heard is, if you take all the solar panels and all the wind turbines in
the world," says Lomborg, "they have (eliminated) less CO2 than what
U.S. fracking (cracking rocks below ground to extract oil and natural
gas) managed to do."

That progress occurred despite opposition
from environmentalists -- and even bans in places like my stupid state,
New York, where activists worry fracking will cause earthquakes or
poison the water.

Do environmentalists even care about measuring
costs instead of just assuming benefits? We spend $7 billion to
subsidize electric cars. Even if America reached the president's absurd
2015 goal of "a million electric cars on the road" (we won't get close),
how much would it delay warming of the Earth?

"One hour," says Lomborg. "This is a symbolic act."

Symbolic.
Environmentalism is now more religion than science. It even comes with
built-in doomsday stories to warn people about what will happen if they
disobey -- a bit like the movie "Noah" that's in theaters now.

While
environmentalists lament that our time is running out, environmental
indicators get better, technological improvements reduce carbon dioxide,
water gets cleaner for millions, and human life expectancy goes up.

This
Earth Day, instead of attacking those who sell fossil fuels, I will
applaud them for overcoming constant environmental hysteria -- while
providing affordable energy that will allow us to fight poverty, which
is the real threat to the people of the world.

The
collapse of a controversial wind export plan has been announced by the
Government on the same day that the UN’s top scientific body called for a
rapid switch to renewable energy to fight climate change.

Minister
for Energy Pat Rabbitte said that “given the economic, policy and
regulatory complexities involved” the Irish and British governments had
failed to agree terms “to facilitate green energy export from the
Midlands within the EU’s 2020 timeframe”.

Under the plan, three
companies – Element Power, Mainstream and Bord na Mona – planned 1,000
turbines in five Midland counties to export three gigawatts of green
energy into the British national grid. Negotiations on the multibillion
euro deal were called off because “there was nothing left to discuss”,
Irish officials said last night.

The decision to abandon
negotiations on the project, which has featured strongly in the local
and European Parliament election campaign, comes before a protest march
planned in Dublin tomorrow.

Pay negotiations

The scheme
needed a regulatory agreement between Dublin and London, which would,
among other things, say who would pay for an interconnector to carry
energy to Wales.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and British prime minister
David Cameron agreed, during St Patrick Day talks in 10 Downing Street,
that officials would be told to make another attempt to reach agreement.

The
move came as Mr Rabbitte warned a deal was “unlikely” because the
British side wanted to pay no more for Irish onshore wind energy than it
would pay in Britain – even though it would have to be taken there.

Irish
sources said no flexibility had been shown by the British department of
energy and climate change after the Downing Street talks.

Mr
Rabbitte’s decision has angered developers who plan to export three
gigawatts of offshore energy from a necklace of projects in the Irish
Sea. They say the move threatens them, even though the projects are
entirely separate.

Brian Britton, who heads one of the
developers, Oriel Energy, said: “They have taken only four-and-a-half
weeks, rather than the three months set down in the Downing Street
agreement.” Mr Britton also leads the National Offshore Wind
Association.

Ironic

“It is somewhat ironic in a week which
has seen the first State visit from an Irish President to the UK, that
the Irish Government has pulled back from a policy initiative which
would have demonstrated the real benefits of partnership in both
economies,” said the association, in a statement.

Mr Rabbitte
regretted that a deal with London “has not been possible” but said wind
energy exports from Ireland to Britain “are inevitable after 2020”.

“Economic
analysis conducted on the Irish side clearly indicates that under
agreed policy and regulatory conditions, renewable energy trading can
deliver significant economic benefits to Ireland and the UK, as well as
being attractive to developers,” he said.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan said delaying the development of renewables would “do us nothing but harm”.

In
its latest report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
said a large-scale transformation of the energy sector from burning
fossil fuels to relying primarily on renewables is needed to contain
global warming at 2 degrees.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

15 April, 2014

The power of prophecy (NOT)

ALL prophecies, including global warming prophecies, should be taken as seriously as the ones below

What they thought we'd wearing today - as imagined in 1893

An
illustrated book from 1893 with one man's prediction of what fashions
of the decades to come would look like has been unearthed.

The
Future Dictates of Fashion by W. Cade Gall was published in the January
1893 edition of The Strand magazine and contains hilarious illustrations
of the 'future of fashion'.

The article, which was found in a library, predicts one hundred years' worth of style.

It
begins in 1900 with a rather wizardly array of garments, including
plenty of walking sticks, oversized hats and voluminous skirts.

The Best Thing for the Environment is for the Government to Stop Controlling It

Yesterday,
the United Nations released a startling report that concludes that
“world leaders” only have a few years to drastically curb carbon
emissions, else the world will face debilitating warming, which would
lead to a rise in sea level that would dramatically change human life
and natural habitats. The report also argues that the world is already
beginning to see the effects of climate change: a higher level of
disease spread in Africa, an increase in the number and severity of
wildfires in North America, and the decrease of food production in South
America.

According to Kelly Levin, a climate change scientist
from the World Resources institute, "Today's choices are going to
significantly affect the risk that climate change will pose for the rest
of the century."

Levin is, of course, correct, but perhaps not
in the way she means. The United Nations and others involved in averting
climate change have all emphasized the importance of the actions of
world leaders in the coming years, from preparedness to last-ditch
attempts to keep the world cool. But what “world leaders” really need to
do is to drastically decrease their “defense” spending, stop propping
up oil industries with counter-productive subsidies, and reduce or
eliminate the regulatory burden on entrepreneurs so that they can
innovate with new energy methods.

Consider the irony: the United
Nations calls upon governments to enact emergency policies to mitigate
climate change, yet those selfsame governments are actually the biggest
hindrances to environmental cleanup efforts.

First, governments
are often the largest polluters on the planet, not private entities. For
instance, in the United States alone, the Pentagon is actually
America’s biggest polluter. The Department of Defense pumps out more
than 750,000 tons of hazardous material every year—that’s more than the
top three chemical companies combined. How are they getting away with
this? Congress passed an explicit provision exempting the military from
any energy reduction efforts. The first thing that the U.S. “world
leader” should do is to cut its own environmental impact.

Second,
the United States government—like many world governments—heavily
subsidizes the carbon-based energy industries while simultaneously
passing “environmental regulations” that make a microscopic dent in
carbon consumption. According to Price of Oil, the U.S. government
spends between $14 and $52 billion in subsidies for the gas, coal, or
oil industries, yet any attempt to reduce this number is thwarted in
Congress. This keeps the price of carbon-based energies artificially
low, interfering with the market process that occurs when goods are
scarce.

In the meantime, the federal government and local
governments impose carbon taxes onto their citizens, creating a perverse
double standard. They attempt to keep people from using carbon-based
products through tax policies while encouraging people to use them by
driving down their prices. Carbon taxes aren’t the only ridiculous
burden governments are placing on citizens to make them pay for their
mistakes: plastic bag taxes, incandescent light bulb bans, the Clean Air
Act, etc.

The list, tragically, is endless, though I would be
remiss to not also mention that the U.S. government hand-crafted the
conditions for the BP oil spill.

Despite all of this,
entrepreneurs and innovators are still trying to come up with ways to
save people money and energy by creating new products for them to
try—only for government to get in the way when they do. For instance,
many of the financial regulations after the bank meltdown have been
biased against green companies and technologies and thus prevent
investors from providing much-needed capital for these ideas to come to
fruition.

Even if you still believe that governments have some
role to play, deregulating markets is still the best way to go to make
sure those policies are effective. According to a 2012 study, “renewable
energy policies are significantly more effective in fostering green
innovation in countries with deregulated energy markets.” Better still,
“public support for renewable energy is crucial only in the generation
of high-quality green patents, whereas competition enhances the
generation of green patents irrespective of their quality.”

In
short, the UN is correct to call upon “world leaders” to mitigate
climate change. But the “action” that must be taken is to deregulate
markets, get out of the way of innovators, and stop maintaining
duplicitous policies. And if governments really feel like they must “do”
something, they can reduce their own carbon emissions by cutting on
so-called “defense” spending—with the bonus of making the world a bit
more peaceful.

Those
of us who have chronicled the global warming hoax, now called “climate
change”, know that it is based on decades of lies about carbon dioxide
and other “greenhouse gas” with predictions that the Earth will heat up
and cause massive problems unless those emissions are drastically
reduced by not using coal, oil and natural gas.

Two American
think tanks, The Heartland Institute and the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) have been among those exposing those lies
for years. The lies have been generated and led by the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Despite the
panel’s insistence that the Earth is getting hotter, five different
datasets show that there have been no observable warming for 17 and a
half years even as carbon dioxide levels have risen 12%,” notes
Christopher Monckton, a science advisor to Britain’s former Prime
Minister Thatcher. “The discrepancy between prediction and observation
continues to grow.”

Recently, two Chinese assistant professors of
economics, Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, were published in the American
Journal of Agricultural Economics. Their paper, “Information
Manipulation and Climate Agreements”, openly advocated lying about
global warming/climate change in order to get nations to sign on to the
International Environmental Agreement.

“It appears that news
media and some pro-environmental organizations,” they noted, “have the
tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate
change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency.”

Craig
Rucker, CFACT’s Executive Director, responded to the Chinese authors
saying “They’re shameless.” Theirs and others ends-justify-the-means
tactics reflects the attitudes and actions of environmental
organizations and serves as a warning to never accept anything they say
on any aspect of this huge hoax.

CFACT’s President and
co-founder, David Rothbard, noted that “Global warming skeptics have
long charged that alarmists are over-hyping the dangers of climate
change.” How long? Back in 1989, the late Stanford University professor,
Stephen Schneider, said, “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts
we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ which we frequently find
ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide
what the right balance between being effective and being honest.”

There
is no “right balance” between telling lies and telling the truth when
it comes to science or any other aspect of our lives. Suffice to say
that thousands of scientists who participated in the IPCC reports over
the years supported the lies, but many have since left and some have
openly denounced the reports.

As the latest IPCC summary of its
report has garnered the usual verbatim media coverage of its outlandish
predictions, The Heartland Institute has released its own 1,062 page
report from the “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
(NIPCC) called “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts. An
18-page summery is available at http://climatechangereconsidered.org.

Among its findings:

- Atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

- There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels.

- Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life.

- A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events.

Based
on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, the NIPCC report is free of the
lies that are found in the IPCC report whose studies have been, at best,
dubious, and at worst, deliberately deceptive.In light of the natural
cooling cycle the Earth has been in that is good news and it will be
even better news when the planet emerges from the cycle that reflects
the lower levels of radiation from the Sun.

On March 31, CNS News
reported that “The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change’s latest report estimates it will cost developed nations an
additional $100 billion each year to help poorer nations adapt to the
devastating effects of ‘unequivocal’ global warming, including food
shortages, infrastructure breakdown, and civil violence. But that figure
was deleted from the report’s executive summary after industrial
nations, including the United States, objected to the high price tag.”

The
price tag reveals the IPCC’s real agenda, the transfer of funds from
industrial nations to those less developed. It’s about the money and
always has been. It’s not global warming the planet needs to survive, it
is the costly lies about it.

EPA Concedes: We Can’t Produce All the Data Justifying Clean Air Rules

Seven
months after being subpoenaed by Congress, Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy conceded that her agency does
not have - and cannot produce - all of the scientific data used
for decades to justify numerous rules and regulations under the Clean
Air Act.

In a March 7th letter to House Science, Space and
Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), McCarthy admitted
that EPA cannot produce all of the original data from the 1993 Harvard
Six Cities Study (HSC) and the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 1995
Cancer Prevention Study II, which is currently housed at New York
University.

Both studies concluded that fine airborne particles
measuring 2.5 micrograms or less (PM2.5) – 1/30th the diameter of a
human hair – are killing thousands of Americans every year.

These
epidemiological studies are cited by EPA as the scientific foundation
for clean air regulations that restrict particulate emissions from
vehicles, power plants and factories.

The agency has recently
come under fire for exposing volunteers to concentrated levels of
particulate matter without informing them of the risks, a practice Rep.
Paul Broun (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on
Investigations and Oversight, called “despicable.”

The full
committee, which issued its first subpoena in 21 years last August after
being stonewalled by the EPA for two years, wanted the raw data from
the studies so that their results could be replicated by independent
researchers. (See EPA subpoena.pdf)

However, despite “multiple
interactions with the third party owners of the research data in an
effort to obtain that data,” McCarthy wrote, some of the data subpoenaed
by the committee “are not (and were not) in the possession, custody or
control of the EPA, nor are they within the authority to obtain data
that the agency identified.”

“EPA has not withheld any data in
our possession that is responsive to the subpoena,” McCarthy stated.
“The EPA acknowledges, however, that the data provided are not
sufficient in themselves to replicate the analyses in the
epidemiological studies, nor would they allow for the one to one mapping
of each pollutant and ecological variable to each subject.” (See EPA
letter to Smith March 7 2014 (1).pdf)

CNSNews.com asked EPA
whether the agency had turned over any data from the Harvard Six Cities
and American Cancer Society studies in response to the subpoena.

“EPA
provided to the Committee all the data that was in the possession of
the agency or within the agency's authority to obtain under the Shelby
Amendment,” which requires that results of federally-funded studies be
made available to the public, an agency spokeswoman responded. “As such,
the agency has now in good faith obtained and provided to the Committee
all the requested research data subject to the Shelby Amendment and
covered by the subpoena.”

A committee staff member confirmed to
CNSNews.com that “EPA gave us what they have of both studies, which is a
significant amount of data, but not sufficient" to allow independent
reproduction or verification of results.

"We’re at a point where
EPA has conceded that they don’t have in their possession the data
necessary to fully comply, and in some cases, never did possess the
data,” he added.

The subpoena was issued as the EPA moves to
finalize strict new regulations that could place 90 percent of the U.S.
population in non-attainment areas and impose an additional $90 billion
annual burden on the U.S. economy.

However, two newer studies cast doubts on the original research.

Stanley
Young and Jessie Xia of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences
published a paper last year questioning the EPA’s reliance on the
Harvard and Cancer Society studies, both of which found that breathing
fine particulate matter (PM2.5) resulted in increased mortality.

“There
is no significant association of PM2.5 with longevity in the west of
the United States,”Young and Xia noted, adding that “our findings
call into question the claim made by the original researchers.” (See
young080113.pdf)

Another recent study by Johns Hopkins-trained
biostatistician Steve Milloy that attempted to duplicate EPA’s findings
also found “no correlation between changes in ambient PM2.5 mortality”
and any cause of death in California between 2007 and 2010.

“Virtually
every regulation proposed by the Obama administration has been
justified by nontransparent data and unverifiable claims,” committee
chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in February, denouncing what he
called EPA’s “secret science.”

“The American people foot the bill
for EPA’s costly regulations, and they have a right to see the
underlying science. Costly environmental regulations should be based on
publicly available data so that independent scientists can verify the
EPA’s claims.”

Smith and Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) have
introduced the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014, which would prohibit
EPA from “proposing, finalizing or disseminating regulations based upon
scientific information that is not publically available in a manner
sufficient for independent scientific analysis.”

HR 4012, which
would amend the Environmental Research, Development and Demonstration
Authorization Act of 1978, states that “the Administrator shall not
propose, finalize, or disseminate a covered action unless all scientific
and technical information relied on to support such covered action is
(A) specifically identified; and (B) publicly available in a manner that
is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of
research results.”

At a February 11th hearing before the
Subcommittee on Environment, Raymond Keating, chief economist at the
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, testified in favor of the
bill. (HHRG-113-SY18-WState-RKeating-20140211.pdf)

“The
U.S. has made enormous progress in cleaning the air over the last 40
years, so much so that we now are talking about reducing very small
increments of pollution. Achieving those tiny reductions will no doubt
be very costly—as EPA itself admitted when it released its cost analysis
for ozone in 2010. The question is: will they be worth it?" Keating
asked.

“We won’t know that unless we have the scientific data in
front of us, unless scientists from all over the country can attempt to
replicate it and determine its validity. Without that, EPA is hiding the
ball, and imposing costs without truly knowing what the benefits are.”

Global
emissions need to fall by at least 40 per cent by 2050 and almost to
zero by 2100 to have a good chance of limiting the increase in the
average temperature to 2C, above which the UN says there could be
catastrophic impacts.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) will underpin negotiations over a global
climate change treaty that the UN hopes will be signed in Paris next
year.

The share of energy from low-carbon sources, such as wind,
solar, nuclear and fossil fuel plants which capture carbon, will have to
increase three or four-fold by 2050.

The IPCC was silent,
however, on how much investment there should be in each source of
energy. It said it was up to each country to decide on the mix of energy
sources it needed to meet its share of the global emissions target.

Countries
that relied on exports of coal and oil could see their revenues decline
if the world took collective action on emissions, it said. Yet exports
of gas, which has about half the emissions of coal per unit of energy
produced, could increase.

The report said: “Greenhouse gas
emissions from energy supply can be reduced significantly by replacing
current world average coal-fired power plants with modern, highly
efficient natural gas combined?cycle power plants.”

It added that
“fugitive emissions” from gas extraction, such as methane, that can
leak from poorly constructed wells, would need to be tightly controlled
to ensure that a switch to gas cut overall emissions.

Ottmar
Edenhofer, co-chairman of the IPCC report and professor of climate
change economics at the Technical University Berlin, said: “The shale
gas revolution… can be very consistent with low-carbon development… Gas
can be very helpful as a bridge technology.”

He cautioned however
that burning more gas would cut emissions only if it displaced coal. If
more gas were burnt as well as coal, overall emissions would rise.

The
report said that the world economy would continue to grow if countries
made “ambitious” emissions cuts but the annual growth rate would be 0.06
per cent lower than it would otherwise have been.

It added that
this estimate did not include the expected economic benefits of cutting
emissions, including the health benefits of reduced air pollution.

Emissions
could be reduced by planting trees across vast areas to absorb carbon
dioxide and then harvesting the wood to burn in power stations fitted
with carbon capture systems, the IPCC said.

It added, however:
“As of today this combination is not available at scale, permanent
underground carbon dioxide storage faces challenges and the risks of
increased competition for land need to be managed.”

Almost all
power stations burning fossil fuels would have to be fitted with carbon
capture systems by the end of the century to avoid catastrophic climate
change, the report said. [....]

Benny Peiser, director of the
Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: “This is the first IPCC report
that will be largely ignored by most policymakers. It will have no
influence on governments’ energy policies that are now almost completely
dominated by energy security and economic considerations. Around the
world the climate issue is being pushed to the margins of decision
making.”

Brainwashing about global warming percolates throughout the British education system

Not
often does a senior Cabinet minister declare that a policy long pursued
by his own department is “against the law”. But that was the response
of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, to a report exposing just how
profoundly our education system has been hijacked by promoters of the
official group-think on global warming.

Expanding on a theme
touched on here more than once over the years, the report for the Global
Warming Policy Foundation by Andrew Montford and John Shade shows how
generations of schoolchildren have been taught to accept as gospel
nothing but a propagandist, Greenpeace-type view of the global-warming
scare, so one-sided that it makes a mockery of the requirement under the
1996 Education Act that pupils only be taught in a balanced way,
allowing them to form their own view of the evidence.

So
relentless is this brainwashing that it percolates throughout the
curriculum, so that even exam papers in French, English or religious
studies can ask students to explain why the world is dangerously warming
up, or why we must build more wind turbines. In 2012, I described an
A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking
for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled
with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son,
after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive
knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions.

He
was given the lowest possible mark, a fail. When his mother paid to
have his paper independently assessed, the new examiner conceded that it
was “articulate, well-structured” and well-informed. But because it did
not parrot the party line, it was still given a fail. I fear this
corruption of everything that education and science should stand for has
become a much more serious scandal than Mr Gove yet realises.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

14 April, 2014

Astrophysics and climate

For
some time I have been aware that there are substantial challenges to
the conventional picture of the sun as a gas ball. I am also aware
that the "electric universe" theory has been gaining ground. As I
already track social science, medical science and climate science,
however, I have refused to add issues in astrophysics to my plate.
Just this once however I am putting up below something from the
"Thunderbolt" project -- which is the organization principally
promoting the electric universe theory

Is Kirchhoff’s Law Valid?

Kirchhoff’s
law of thermal emission (formulated in 1860) is presented and
demonstrated to be invalid. This law is crucial to our
understanding of radiation within arbitrary cavities. Kirchhoff’s
law rests at the heart of condensed matter physics and
astrophysics. Its collapse can be directly associated with 1) the
loss of universality in Planck’s law (Planck’s constant and Boltzmann’s
constant are no longer universal in nature), 2) the collapse of the
gaseous Sun as described in Standard Solar Models, and 3) the inability
of the Big Bang to act as the source of the microwave background.

Pierre-Marie
Robitaille, PhD is a Professor of Radiology at The Ohio State
University, with a joint appointment in Chemical Physics. He initially
trained as a spectroscopist and has wide ranging knowledge of
instrumentation in the radio and microwave bands. A recognized expert in
image acquisition and analysis, Professor Robitaille was responsible
for doubling the world record in Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 1998. In
2000, he turned his attention to thermodynamics and astrophysics,
demonstrating that the universality advanced in Kirchhoff’s Law of
Thermal Emission is invalid. He has published extensively on the
microwave background, highlighting that this signal arises from water on
the Earth and has no relationship to cosmology and has recently
published a paper on the Liquid Metallic Hydrogen Solar Model (LMHSM).

Writes PSI President John O’Sullivan:

PSI’s
Vice Chair Dr Pierre Latour was a co-speaker at the Thunderbolts
Conference where Dr Robitaille gave that address. Latour peer reviewed
Robitaille’s science and affirmed it was sound. Latour agrees that what
Robitaille has now proven about radiation also applies to – and
discredits – global warming ‘science’ because it shows that the IPCC’s
understanding of how radiation warms the climate is wrong.

Robitaille’s
science says that when atmospheric temperature increases, then CO2
emissivity goes down. This entirely supports what 350+ PSI experts say.
Moreover, Dr Latour affirms this is consistent with Hottel, Perry’s
“Chemical Engineer’s Handbook”, 1950. It again shows that experts from
the ‘hard’ sciences are better able to adduce what happens within
earth’s climate system than those climatologists (mostly geographers)
who are ‘soft’ scientists, with inferior knowledge and training in
higher physics and chemistry.

Robitaille’s explanation of solar
behavior (sunspots, eruptions and wind) fits beautifully with that of
PSI consultant and friend, Piers Corbyn, the worlds best independent
long range weather forecaster. Dr Laotur reports, “Robitaille’s science
points to how Corbyn does it: solar wind drives jet streams which drive
climate change. Electric Universe is coming into focus, ions and
electrons on the go, electrical and chemical engineering hand in hand.
CO2 is innocent.”

Governments
must switch from fossil fuels to nuclear, wind and solar energy to
avoid a global-warming catastrophe in a move costing about £300 billion a
year, a United Nations report warns.

The study, by the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lays out the pressing
need for the world to ditch coal and oil and switch to green energy.

However,
the report is likely to spark a new row over the cost of countering
global warming. Climate-change sceptics issued a warning to governments
not to succumb to a green agenda, alleging that to do so would drive up
living costs for the rest of the century.

A leaked draft of the
report, obtained by The Telegraph, provides a blueprint on how to tackle
climate change, including not only the switch to green energy but even
what people should eat. It claims:

* An estimated
£300 billion a year is needed for investment in low-carbon sources of
electricity such as nuclear, wind and solar energy over the next 20
years;

* Gas should replace coal-fired power stations
as soon as possible to reduce carbon emissions, although gas should
eventually be phased out, too;

* Nuclear power is an
established method for producing low-carbon electricity, although the
report notes its use has waned since 1993;

* Experts
estimate that by 2030, global gross domestic product (GDP) could be as
much as 4 per cent lower through measures to combat global warming. By
2100, global GDP could be down by as much as 12 per cent;

*
Western diets need to become more sustainable and environmentally
friendly. This is likely to include a call to eat less meat.

The
change of lifestyle is not mapped out in detail but the UN suggests that
people living in the richest countries should eat less. That advice
will inevitably lead to accusations that the UN is interfering in
personal habits.

The central thrust of the report will be a call
for “large-scale changes in the global energy system” and increased
subsidy for green energy to help countries make the switch from fossil
fuels.

The cost of doing so, according to the 29-page draft
summary, will require an additional £90 billion a year investment, a
rise of a third on estimates of current spending.

That will take
the total investment in low carbon energy sources to about £300? billion
a year until 2030. Britain now spends about £6 billion a year, trying
to cut greenhouse gas emissions through such measures as subsidies for
wind farms and solar power. There will be pressure for that figure to
rise sharply.

The report warns that to achieve a target of
keeping the global temperature rise to within 3.6F (2C) by the end of
the century will require spending on alternative energy and a scaling
back of fossil fuels that, the report acknowledges, will damage economic
growth.

The call for a change in energy policy will inevitably
lead to further tensions in the Coalition with many back-bench
Conservatives anxious that wind power is too expensive and the turbines
unsightly.

Many Tories are pushing for the exploitation of
underground shale gas reserves through the controversial process of
fracking to extract the gas. Fracking has become big business in the US
and driven down the cost of energy.

Ed Davey, the Liberal
Democrat Energy and Climate Change Secretary, is likely to seize upon
the report to resist further demands to cut green energy subsidies.

Senior
Tory MPs warned the Government not to succumb to pressure from the UN
to plough more money into renewable energy, driving up household energy
bills and threatening to make British industry uncompetitive in the
process.

Chris Heaton-Harris, a Conservative MP who led a
successful back-bench campaign to cut the consumer subsidy to wind
farms, said: “This IPCC report is backward looking. We can be a lot
greener, emit less carbon and produce cheaper energy if we switch to
shale gas rather than ploughing our money into wind farms that plunge
the poorest people into fuel poverty.”

Benny Peiser, director of
the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank that has warned
against the cost of switching to green energy, said: “Even if the IPCC
assumptions prove correct, it will be much more cost effective and
rational to invest in adaptation strategies to deal with climate change
than try to decarbonise the world economy.”

However, [geologist]
Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate
Change, based at the London School of Economics, said: “This report
shows that if we carry on the way we are going, it will be much more
expensive and risky to take action later on.”

The IPCC report
into man-made climate change is the most authoritative of its kind and
forms the basis for policymaking among UN member nations.

Last
week, government officials meeting in Berlin were combing through the
draft report to come up with a final document countries can agree upon.

World
leaders will gather at a specially convened UN conference in New York
in September, before approving a new set of international agreements on
carbon emissions in Paris next year. The new report will form the basis
for those negotiations.

Residents
of an isolated mountain valley of terraced cornfields in China were
just going to sleep last April when they were jolted by an enormous
roar, followed by a tower of flames. A shock wave rolled across the
valley, rattling windows and a mysterious, pungent gas swiftly pervaded
homes.

"It was so scary - everyone who had a car fled the village
and the rest of us without cars just stayed and waited to die," said
Zhang Mengsu, a hardware store owner.

All too quickly, residents realised the source of the midnight fireball: a shale gas drilling rig in their tiny rural hamlet.

This
verdant valley represents the latest frontier in the worldwide hunt for
shale gas retrievable by the technology of hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking. It is a drilling boom that has upended the energy industry and
spurred billions of dollars of investment.

Like the US and
Europe, China wants to wean itself from its dependence on energy imports
- and in Jiaoshizhen, Chinese energy giant Sinopec says it has made the
country's first commercially viable shale gas discovery. Its efforts
could also help tackle another urgent issue, as Beijing looks to curb an
overwhelming reliance on coal that has blackened skies and made China
the largest contributor to global warming.

But the path to energy
independence and a cleaner fossil fuel is fraught with potential
pitfalls. Threats to workplace safety, public health and the environment
loom large in the shale gas debate - and the question is whether those
short-term risks threaten to undermine China's long-term goal.

The
energy industry around the world has faced criticism about the economic
viability of vast shale projects and the environmental impact of
fracking. But interviews with residents of six hamlets here where
drilling is being done, as well as with executives and experts in
Beijing, the US and Europe, suggest China's search poses even greater
challenges.

In China, companies must drill two to three times as
deep as in the US, making the process more expensive, noisier and
potentially more dangerous. Chinese energy giants also operate in strict
secrecy; they rarely engage with local communities, and accidents claim
a high death toll.

The still-disputed incident in Jiaoshizhen
has raised concerns among residents. Villagers said that employees at
the time told them that eight workers died when the rig exploded that
night. Sinopec officials and village leaders then ordered residents not
to discuss the event, villagers said. Now, villagers complain of fouled
streams and polluted fields.

"There was a huge ball of fire,"
said Liu Jiazhen, a mustard greens farmer with three children who lives a
five-minute walk from the site. "The managers here all raced for their
lives up the hill."

Sinopec describes the incident as a
controlled flaring of gas and denies anybody died. While the company
would not speak in detail about its shale projects, Sinopec said it ran
its operations safely and without harm to the environment.

Sinopec president Li Chunguang said last month that nothing had gone wrong in Jiaoshizhen.

The
Chinese energy giants have plenty of money to fund efforts. Sinopec has
1 million employees and is the world's fourth-largest company by
revenue after Royal Dutch Shell, Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil; the
fifth-largest is China National Petroleum. With their deep pockets, the
companies have been investing heavily in North American shale
businesses; Sinopec paid $US2.2 billion in 2012 for a 30 per cent stake
in Devon Energy's shale gas and oil operations in the US.

In
China, workplace safety is a significant concern. Thousands die each
year in coalmines, according to government statistics that have prompted
a national crackdown in the past decade.

Residents interviewed
welcomed the drilling for one reason: money. Sinopec rents land from
farmers for 9000 renminbi, or $1543, an acre each year. Farmers earn
that much money from growing crops only in the best years, and then
after hundreds of hours of labour.

Carbon
emissions are in the news again, with the EU proposing a hefty
reduction, but is this all a lot of hot air? In her new autobiography,
The Bird and the Beeb, the broadcaster Liz Kershaw recalls a surprising
moment of honesty on the subject from Tony Blair in 2007.

With
the microphones switched off, the presenter was chatting about green
issues when Blair suddenly sighed. “Liz, we in the UK could shut
everything down and turn everything off,” he said. “And within two years
all our efforts would have been wiped out by what’s happening in China
now.” Kershaw says she hasn’t bothered to switch off her television
since.

Renewable
energy subsidies that helped spur Europe’s €48-billion-a-year clean
energy industry are to be phased out across the continent, under new
market-friendly state aid rules announced by the European Commission
Wednesday (9 April).

"It is time for renewables to join the
market,” the Commission's competition chief, Joaquin Almunia, said in a
statement. “The new guidelines provide a framework for designing more
efficient public support measures that reflect market conditions, in a
gradual and pragmatic way."

Under the new rules, renewable energy
subsidies will have to be replaced by market-based mechanisms for all
but the smallest of clean electricity generators by 2017, following a
pilot phase that will start next year.

Feed-in tariffs will be
replaced by feed-in premiums that expose renewables to market signals,
while energy infrastructure and cross-border schemes will also to some
extent be protected, and 68 energy intensive sectors will be singled out
for subsidies. Aid may also be earmarked for measures to keep the
lights on through capacity mechanisms should power cuts threaten.

More
generally though, competitive bidding processes will become the rule,
forcing power generators to sell electricity on the market with
balancing responsibilities for “short-term deviations” from delivery
commitments.

EU states will be obliged to use premiums – top-up’s
on the going price – as support instruments to integrate renewables
into the market.

The complicated new regulations emerged
from an investigation into the market-distorting potential of Germany’s
renewable energy subsidies which were intended to help the country’s
transition to a low-carbon economy after the Fukushima disaster.

It
was premised, Almunia said, on the principle that “Europe should meet
its ambitious energy and climate targets at the least possible cost for
taxpayers and without undue distortions of competition.”

Free market limitations

In
a sign that the Commission’s free market vision had some limitations
though, high-polluting industrise such as the chemicals, metals, paper,
and ceramics sectors will be allowed exemptions from paying full market
premium support to renewable power generators.

One report by
Germany’s respected Öko Institute suggests that these opt-outs could be
worth as much as €2 billion. But Gordon Moffat, the director-general of
Eurofer said that although the new rules were “appreciated,” the
Commission’s proposed 15% minimum contribution to renewable subsidies
would “lead to a further substantial increase in energy costs”. He
called for a revision of the EU’s 2030 climate and energy framework.

While
welcoming the proposals as “a step in the right direction,” the
European Aluminium Association also said that to restore Europe’s
industrial competitiveness, they would need more access to public
revenues.

“We regret that the new guidelines still
enforce additional burden to the industry,” said the EAA’s
director-general, Gerd Götz. “The state aid rules must now be
accompanied by appropriate and long-term compensation measures for all
costs related to climate and energy policies, also beyond 2020.”

For
the Green MEP Claude Turmes though, the industry exemptions were in
“complete contradiction” with the Commission’s free market principles.

Free ride for energy intensive industry?

“The
energy intensive industry is not just the biggest polluter in Europe,
it is a ruthless sponge lobbyist,” he told EurActiv. “If you offer them a
finger they will take the hand. If you give them that, they take the
arm. If you give them the arm, they will devour you in your entirety.”

“Despite
consuming up to 35% of electricity, these sectors will get a free ride,
with private consumers and small businesses left to foot the bill of
the energy transition.”

The Commission’s announcement was made
two days after the United Nations Environment Programme reported a 44%
plunge in renewable energy investment in Europe, spreading a sense of
gloom among clean energy enthusiasts.

One clause in the new rules
lowering the cap on the level of allowed support to energy efficiency
measures was described as “astonishing” by E3G, an environmental think
tank.

“This seems ironic, if not illogical,” the group said.
“Only last month, the European Council concluded that energy efficiency
was the first step to take to reduce the bloc’s energy dependency and
deliver its energy and climate objectives.”

The new rules may,
however, make it more difficult for the UK and other governments
to subsidise nuclear energy projects such as the proposed Hinkley Point
reactor, according to Greenpeace.

A general block exemption
regulation is still being drafted by the European Commission and,
analysts say, could have a significant effect on resource efficient
technologies and their cost-effective financing.

Carbon
dioxide levels in Germany have been increasing in the last three years
despite the government spending nearly $140 billion (100 billion euros)
on a green energy since 2005.

The German newspaper Die Zeit
writes that Germany won’t be able to meet its emissions reduction target
of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Currently, the country has
only reduced emissions 23.8 percent below 1990 levels.

The
“German government wanted to decrease the emissions of CO2 — also
through the transition to renewable energy,” writes Die Zeit. “However
our chart shows the opposite is the case. Greenhouse gas emissions have
been increasing for three years in Germany, 1.2 percent for last year.”

In
2009, Germany emitted 913 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, mainly
due to a lagging economy from the global financial crisis. Last year,
the country emitted 951 million metric tons of carbon dioxide despite
spending about $138 billion to go green in the last decade.

What’s
causing the rise in carbon dioxide emissions? Coal power, according to
Die Zeit. The newspaper writes that “CO2 emissions continue to rise as
more and more coal and lignite power stations” are brought online and
natural gas plants remain uneconomical to operate.

German power
prices have been driven to three times what they are in the U.S. and 50
percent higher than the rest of Europe because of green energy tariffs.
In order to meet its emission reduction targets, Germany has been taxing
businesses and households to subsidize green energy sources, like wind
and solar.

But the tax to fund green energy has been increasing
rapidly, more than fivefold since 2009 — costing Germans $26 billion
last year alone. German industries have also been hit hard with rising
power costs and are pushing for reform.

The German government is
now looking to reform the green energy law that has caused energy prices
to spike. The German cabinet approved amendments to the country’s green
law on Tuesday that would contain rising energy costs, reports the Wall
Street Journal.

But energy analysts are wary that the amendments
don’t go far enough to curb rising energy costs. The reform would still
exempt many of the same energy-intensive industries from green taxes as
it did before, meaning German households would still bear most of the
cost of going green.

“Germany says the exemptions are crucial to
keeping its energy-intensive industries competitive, but Brussels fears
that too many businesses might have benefited from what it considers
state aid,” the WSJ reports. “While the exemptions originally focused on
such sectors as steel and machinery engineering, they were later
expanded to include less obvious beneficiaries, such as railway
operators.”

Germany’s energy and economics minister Sigmar
Gabriel said the number of exempted companies was reduce to from 2,000
to about 1,600, and that companies that previously benefited from
exemptions have to pay 20 percent of the green tax going forward.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

13 April, 2014

Liberals focus on happy thoughts? Really?

The
article criticized below goes back to research by John Hibbing.
Hibbing is an expert at applying derogatory names to highly ambiguous
stimuli. His research amounts to little else. Changes in
skin conductance, for instance, could mean many things but Hibbing
always manages to label such changes in a way that is derogatory to
conservatives.

He certainly does show some physiological
differences between liberals and conservatives but ALL the differences
he describes could much less imaginatively be described as showing
simply that conservatives are more cautious and more alert for things
that they should be cautious about. That conservatives are more
cautious is no discovery, however. Conservatives have rightly been
described that way -- by both themselves and others -- for over 100
years

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, whose writing I
commend heartily to readers of Somewhat Reasonable, this morning called
my attention to some fascinating research reported recently in Mother
Jones. It is truly not every day that Kass cites Mother Jones, so I was
intrigued.

In ”Can Conservatives be fixed scientifically?” Kass
quotes an April 4 Mother Jones article – This Machine Can Tell Whether
You’re Liberal or Conservative – as saying conservatives “go through the
world more attentive to negative, threatening and disgusting stimuli.”

For
reasons that won’t come as any surprise to readers of Somewhat
Reasonable, my mind immediately turned to environmental issues, and
climate change in particular. Surely Mother Jones and the researcher
whose work it reports, University of Nebraska-Lincoln political
scientist John Hibbing, would recognize environmental alarmism as a
glaring exception to this notion that conservatives are the “negative”
ones?

But alas, there’s no evidence Mother Jones or Hibbing recognize this gap in Hibbing’s theory.

Mother
Jones reports: “Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to
egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers,
whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find
outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find
them threatening.” (italics mine)

Hibbing and Mother Jones
clearly want to conclude conservatives are the ones described by the
phrases I’ve italicized. But on climate change and other environmental
issues, that’s simply not true.

“Hierarchical” describes people
who see the world as being “ranked,” with some groups of people higher
than others. Think of the left’s obsession with “class warfare” and
you’ll get some idea of where they’re coming from. People who are “more
hierarchical” are likely to believe individuals can’t manage their own
lives – they need the government to tell them what to do and how to do
it. Granted, some conservatives are like that on some issues … but
liberals are like that, big time, on energy and environment and climate
change issues. It is the liberals, after all, who talk about “global”
warming and think a “global” governing body – the United Nations – has
all the answers on climate change.

And on climate change, clearly
liberals are the ones who “prefer harsher punishments.” They call for
Nuremberg trials and even the death penalty for climate change
“deniers.”

(N.B.: The phrase “climate change deniers” is not
something that would be used by “happy,” “positive” people. Nobody is
denying climate change happens. The Nongovernmental International Panel
on Climate Change notes in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical
Science, “Any human global climate signal is so small as to be nearly
indiscernible against the background variability of the natural climate
system. Climate change is always occurring.”)

Finally, it’s
clearly the liberals who find “outsiders or out-groups” threatening. Why
else would they label the scientists who disagree with them “deniers,”
refuse to engage in civil debate or even speak at events to share their
views in an open forum?

On energy, environment, and climate
issues, it is the “conservatives and their rambunctious libertarian
siblings,” as Kass calls us, who have a positive message to deliver:
that global warming is not a crisis, the likely benefits of man-made
global warming exceed the likely costs, and mankind is not the scourge
on Earth that liberals make us out to be.

Researchers say reefs and their fish were almost identical to today's far earlier than thought

Warming
by a couple of degrees is regularly said by climate catastrophists to
"endanger" coral reefs. Coral reefs as we know them could be wiped
out, they claim. The record below shows the opposite. Even
the vast temperature changes (up and down) over the last 50 million
years have wrought NO change to coral reefs

The world's reefs looked almost identical 50 million years ago, researchers have said.

They
say reef fish - including the clownfish made famous in Disney's Finding
Nemo, were already in place, alongside virtually all the major families
of the 4,500 species of fish seen today.

The new study shows
that the ancestors of these fish colonized reefs in two distinct waves,
before and after the mass extinction event about 66 million years ago
that wiped out the dinosaurs.

'Reef fish represent one of the
largest and most diverse assemblages of vertebrates', said Samantha
Price, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Evolution and
Ecology at UC Davis.

'If you were able to dive on a coral reef 50
million years ago, the fishes would seem familiar, you would recognize
it as similar to a modern reef,' she said.

Price is first author on a paper describing the work, published April 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They
found fossil record of reef fish is patchy, so Price and colleagues
traced their ancestry by developing a comprehensive family tree of the
major group of modern ocean fish, the acanthomorphs or 'spiny-finned
fish,' and calculating the times when different groups migrated into or
out of reef habitats.

The first wave of colonization occurred
between 70 and 90 million years ago, before the end of the Cretaceous
period, they found.

At that time, most the world's reefs were built not by coral but by mollusks called rudists.

Rudists
disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, 66
million years ago, and corals became the world's great reef builders.

While
the first-wave reef fish hung on to leave descendants in the present, a
second wave of colonization took place as the world recovered from the
extinction event.

The early wave of colonization began with lots
of different-looking fish and over time there was an eventual filling of
ecological niches accompanied by a decrease in colonization, Price
said.

By about 50 million years ago, the fundamentals of modern
coral reefs, including the ancestors of most major families, such as
clownfishes and parrotfishes, were in place, Price said.

Why is the American Geophysical Union Prioritizing Climate Alarmism Over Scientific Inquiry?

I
had a comment rejected by a blog of the American Geophysical Union
(AGU) last night because I included within it a link to a blog post by a
climate scientist, Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., who has over 370
peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals to his name.

Any aspersions this casts on the AGU's objectivity and spirit of scientific inquiry are entirely earned.

Climate
alarmists -- those who believe humankind is dramatically affecting the
climate in a very harmful way -- have often censored contrary views
(e.g., routinely deleted comments at the uber-alarmist blog Real
Climate; the revelation in Climategate that alarmist scientists were
prepared to "redefine what the peer-review literature is" or shut down
academic journals if they published skeptics' papers; the decision by
various publications and websites including Popular Science, the Los
Angeles Times and Reddit to block comment postings by skeptics; among
others).

Despite this, I did not expect my rather casual comment
to the AGU blog to be censored. In it, I provided a link to a paper
praised by the blog's author, Dan Satterfield. The blog post itself had
encouraged people to read the paper, but a linking error prevented full
access to the paper itself at a spot where such a link was advertised. I
supplied one.

But in a move that proved fatal to my comment, I
also included a link to comments by Dr. Pielke, Sr. questioning the
methodology of the paper recommended by the AGU post.

I know this
because Mr. Satterfield sent me an email highlighting the following
from his blog's comment policy: "I do not publish links to junk science
papers/sites. This is not a platform for you to publicize junk science."

Let us examine what constitutes "junk science" to the AGU and/or its representative.

Mr.
Satterfield was promoting a 2010 paper, Anderegg et. al., 2010, "Expert
Credibility in Climate Change," whose lead author was a graduate
student, which attempted to claim scientists who are alarmist on global
warming are more prominent than those who are not by counting the number
of journal papers with the word "climate" in them, per scientist, that
pop up in Google.

Dr. Pielke, Sr., who is not, as it happens, a
skeptic of the theory that humans are having a strong impact on global
climate (though he does believe the IPCC underestimates the impact on
climate of humans' use of aerosols and land, which irritates some
anti-CO2 activists), believed the Anderegg paper had weaknesses. He
commented on this in a 2010 blog post and provided links to comments by
other experts unconvinced of the strength of the Anderegg paper.

One
of those, Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, writing on the
American Association for Advancement of Science website, explained three
criticisms of the paper's methodology:

The study allowed for no nuance in the views of scientists. All
scientists were lumped into one of two groups.

The study limited its analysis to scientists who had signed public
statements on climate science or participated in IPCC proceedings.

The study conflated frequency of appearance in peer-reviewed
publications with prominence.

The AGU blog didn't want its readers to know of these and other criticisms.

Why?

And it's not as if the AGU blog post itself was high-minded and limited only to discussions of peer-reviewed science.

Its opening paragraph criticized anticipated commenters for linking to
websites with unflattering pictures of Al Gore before they could even
have read the post, let alone commented.

It bizarrely claimed the fact that an NBC correspondent interviewed a
non-skeptic political scientist instead of, presumably, a skeptic
climate scientist to "balance" alarmists in a story was evidence for the
catastrophic global warming theory.

It said that interviewing anyone [emphasis added] about climate science
who has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal is "lousy
journalism, and the equivalent of doing a story about the Apollo Moon
missions, and then giving the chem-trail believer down the street equal
time to say the Moon landing was fake, and pro-wrestling is real!"
Really? Anyone?

And
most significantly, it rudely and one-sidedly attacked a University of
Colorado at Boulder professor (who is not a skeptic), Dr. Roger Pielke,
Jr. (coincidentally, the son of the scientist I linked to about the
Anderegg study, but the two debates are unrelated otherwise and
separated by about four years) for telling the Senate last year that
extreme weather events have not increased in recent decades, a view that
happens to be consistent with that of the IPCC, but also politically
inconvenient for the White House, which attacked him. (For background on
that not supplied by the AGU, go here for his story in the New
Republic; go here for a review of the matter in the New York Times by
Andrew Revkin (also not a skeptic).)

My blog comment was nothing
special, nor was the blog post upon which I commented. But it is
important to note how little it takes for an AGU blog to censor an
opposing view, even about a study as unremarkable as one that counts the
number of papers scientists study (aka, a study not even about hard
science!).

The American Geophysical Union stands with a small
clique of "approved" alarmists on global warming, and it wants to make
sure you do, too.

President
Obama just unveiled his FY2015 budget proposal. His plan includes
hefty new taxes on job creators. Much of this burden will fall on the
energy industry, which has proven to be a particularly powerful engine
of new employment in recent years.

Indeed, the oil and natural
gas sector now supports 9.8 million jobs. Yet the Obama budget slaps it
with $100 billion in new taxes over the next decade -- that's about 10
percent of all of the new tax revenue his package would generate.

In
pushing for higher rates on proven job creators, President Obama is
undermining his own State of the Union promise to provide
government-based solutions to economic inequality.

The average
oil and natural gas sector wage is about $12,000 above the national
average. And these industry opportunities aren't exclusively the domain
of highly educated specialists, like geologists and petrochemical
engineers. In fact, most energy jobs are skilled blue collar, such as
drill operators and construction specialists.

Job opportunities
abound for women and minorities. A new study from IHS finds that the
oil, natural gas and petrochemicals industries will generate up to 1.3
million new job opportunities by 2030 -- with almost 408,000 positions
projected to be held by African American and Hispanic workers, while
women will fill an estimated 185,000 industry jobs.

The domestic
energy industry has already turned around the economic fortunes of some
parts of America. North Dakota, for example, has recently become one of
the largest energy producers in the United States. In the fourth quarter
of last year, the state generated an astonishing one million barrels of
oil a day.

As a result of its ongoing energy boom, North
Dakota's per-capita income has jumped an astounding 114 percent since
2000, raising the state from 39th to 5th in average personal income. And
its unemployment rate is now at a national low of 2.6 percent.

North
Dakota shows how unleashing private energy entrepreneurs to develop our
natural resources generates robust employment and widespread economic
opportunity. Strapping those same firms with huge new taxes will drain
them of the capital needed to finance such expeditions. And it will mute
the profit potential of new ventures, reducing the incentive to take
the risk in the first place.

Fortunately, there's still time for
the administration to move away from policies that undermine job
creation potential in the oil and natural gas sector. And there are
obvious, pro-active steps officials could be taking to hasten energy
sector growth and cultivate job growth.

For starters, the
government needs to open the door for private investments to modernize
the national energy infrastructure. The existing pipeline, storage,
processing, and rail systems were designed at a time when the bulk of
our domestic energy transportation involved moving imported crude and
petroleum from the Gulf Coast toward the northern United States.

Thanks
to the production surge in the Northeast and Canada, the national flow
of energy shipments has effectively reversed since then. Crude oil
shipments from the Gulf to the Midwest decreased 500,000 barrels per day
over the last five years. Meanwhile, shipments running the opposite
direction jumped from 50,000 to 380,000 barrels a day.

Clearly,
our national energy infrastructure needs a redesign. And investment in
infrastructure upgrades would generate massive economic gains. A newly
released analysis from the IHS consulting group found that essential
infrastructure improvements could, over the next decade, elicit up to
$1.14 trillion in new private capital investment and support 1.15
million new jobs per year.

Public policymakers should also
revisit decades-old restrictions on energy exports. A new International
Energy Agency report warns that the growing volume of crude oil
prevented from reaching international markets threatens to put the
brakes on production growth. Exporting a portion of our abundant
supplies to overseas allies would stimulate additional industry
expansion here at home.

Of course, this administration's big
concern when considering pro-energy policies is climate change. But the
president needs to recognize that the oil and gas industry is an ally,
not an enemy, in this fight.

The voluntary evolution of the
energy sector toward natural gas has dramatically reduced greenhouse
emissions. And the traditional energy sector has been investing heavily
in low- and zero-carbon technologies. Indeed, one out of every six
dollars going to green tech today comes from the oil and gas business.

As
the president begins his campaign to promote his new budget, the oil
and natural gas industry stands ready to work with anyone interested in
harnessing our nation's vast energy resources to create jobs and grow
the economy.

The world must switch from fossil fuels to nuclear power to beat global warming, a major United Nations report warns today.

Scientists
claim governments need to ditch traditional sources of energy, such as
coal and oil, to avoid a climate change catastrophe.

Instead, they must adopt nuclear power in a 'large-scale' move costing around £300billion a year.

The
report, by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
also highlights an urgent need for governments to switch to green energy
sources, such as wind and solar power.

It states that additional
spending on alternative energy is needed to keep the global temperature
rise to within 3.6F (20C) by the end of the century, according to a
leaked draft of the report obtained by The Sunday Telegraph.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels, which are damaging to economic growth, will need to be scaled back.

The
move should see gas replace coal-fired power stations in upcoming years
to reduce carbon emissions, before gas itself is eventually phased out
too, says the report.

The 29-page document has already sparked concern over the cost of countering global warming.

Last
night, senior Tory MPs warned governments about the risks of increasing
funding for renewable energy sources, saying this would drastically
raise household and other living costs.

Chris Heaton-Harris MP,
who led a successful campaign to cut the consumer subsidy to wind farms,
told the newspaper: 'This IPCC report is backward looking.

'We
can be a lot greener, emit less carbon and produce cheaper energy if we
switch to shale gas rather than ploughing our money into wind farms that
plunge the poorest people into fuel poverty.'

However, others
have claimed it would be much more expensive to continue using fossil
fuels and risk sea-level rise, flooding, droughts and other impacts of
global warming.

As well as a switch to nuclear power, scientists
have also recommended that Western diets should become more sustainable
and enviromentally friendly.

People in the richest countries should eat less food - and in particular, less meat, they said.

According to the report, the cost of the 'large-scale changes in the global energy system' will cost £90billion a year.

The
U.N.'s expert panel on climate change spent the whole of yesterday
putting together the document, which aims to help governments,
industries and people take action to stop global warming from reaching
dangerous levels.

Like many scientific studies, it uses a breakdown of emissions from low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high income countries.

It was the third of the IPCC's four-part assessment on climate change, its first since 2007.

Controversy.
Confrontation. Facts. Such words could be used to describe the
past, exciting week for CFACT as they held their 2nd REAL Energy Speaker
Series, featuring Marc Morano.

Morano, the founder and executive
editor of ClimateDepot.com, and noted TV commentator on such channels
as FOX News, CNN, and The Blaze, was the featured speaker for two
different New York campuses.

For two nights at Syracuse
University and SUNY-Albany, Morano addressed large crowds to discuss the
climate change narrative driving so much of our popular culture and
policy. Morano focused on the growing number of contradictions within
the rank-and-file of scientists and climate change activists, and how it
has overshadowed much of the scientific evidence prevalent in those
same circles.

First, on a Tuesday evening in the 100-seat Gifford
Auditorium, the room was nearly filled with students and activists on
both sides of the issue, eager to hear what Morano had to say.

Morano
started his discussion with introductory videos of his past debates on
television, then dipped into the myriad of quotes setting the stage for
where the climate change debate stands today. He talked about how all of
these ideas simply amount to “scientific crap.”

From there,
Morano looked into all areas of the debate, from stagnant global
temperatures, carbon-dioxide emissions, the geological record, what the
UN-IPCC (The global warming division of the United Nations) has recently
published, and where scientists have begun to “jump ship” from their
previously held beliefs of human-induced global warming.

The most
interesting point raised by Morano was that most people in the room
hadn’t experienced “global warming” since they were infants.
Despite the dire warnings from alarmists, there has been no rise in the
global mean temperature in the last 17.5 years.

Speaking on the
issues of energy, and its potential alternatives, Morano noted that
carbon-based energies are “the moral choice.” The REAL Energy, Not Green
Energy campaign has centered its approach around these arguments, since
tangible, ‘real’ forms of energy provide for a lifestyle that is clean,
productive, and healthy. Other forms of energy touted by
environmentalists, such as wind and solar simply cannot produce enough
to serve as a viable alternative.

Quotes served as a driver for
much of the lecture, from both those who openly claim the true nature
behind the global warming narrative, to those who have rescinded their
alarmist views. Although some would be quick to dismiss these as
anecdotal, Morano noted how prominent some of names are. Many of the
scientists and scholars he quoted throughout the presentation were
previously global leaders of the climate change movement, such as those
involved with the UN-IPCC.

At the end of the lecture, many of
those staunchly opposed to even considering the Morano’s point-of-view
took the opportunity to ask questions.

While some questions served to clarify certain points, most served as a platforms to denounce Morano and his “fancy” wardrobe.

“This suit cost $200,” quipped an incredulous Morano.

One
noted environmentalist sought to yell at the Climate Depot founder for
not supporting an economy solely run by green-energy alternatives. Of
course, the question was asked in an air-conditioned and well-lit room,
thanks to those very fossil fuels the student reviled, but Morano
addressed the importance for technological innovations to ensure
affordable, secure, and efficient energy solutions.

James Ward,
the Chairman of CFACT at Syracuse, said of the evening, “Mr. Morano gave
a very different take on the global warming movement. Instead of
embracing it, he brought up logical questions that tore it apart. It’s
wrong to correlate climate change with just one variable (CO2
emissions.) The earth is way too complex to simplify it like that.”

The
following night at SUNY-Albany, Morano took to the stage to give a
similar lecture to an audience that contained students, professors, and
local community members who had heard him earlier on local talk shows.

Morano
called for accountability of the many claims made by climate change
activists and environmentalists that have proven untrue over time. Some
of these claims include, as Morano noted in this report:

“We
envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms,
hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels…food riots, mass starvation,
state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and
including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and
deadly…persistent drought and hunger will force millions of people to
abandon their traditional lands and flee to the squalor of shantytowns.”

After finishing his talk, audience members had the opportunity
to ask questions and it started right away with a in-depth discussion
between Morano and a professor in the audience. He attempted to belittle
Morano’s credibility and held up scandal plagued Michal Mann as the
preferred voice on the topic.

The event concluded with several
other questions on different areas of the climate change debate, as well
as the viability of various energy sources such as coal, natural gas,
and solar power.

Pat Moran, CFACT Chairman at Albany, thought
that the event was a huge success. He said of the event, “Mr. Morano’s
presentation challenged the established views of students and
instructors, which made some nod their heads in agreement, while others
tried to shout him down. We at UAlbany were very impressed with Mr.
Morano’s unabashed critique of the global warming hysteria, and his
ability to stand true to his principles under such rigorous questioning
from UAlbany faculty and students.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

11 April, 2014

Fox News Covers Heartland Climate Change Work?

The
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has been
in Washington, DC this week to release Climate Change Reconsidered II:
Biological Impacts.

We are really pleased to call your attention
to coverage we received Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier,”
the Fox News Channel’s flagship 6 p.m. ET news program. Heartland
President Joe Bast said, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Baier’s
show regularly beats its competition on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and HLN
combined, by a substantial margin. This was the second day in a row Fox
covered the release of Biological Impacts; Fox News’ Chicago
correspondent, Mike Tobin, interviewed Joe for a segment that aired on
Tuesday.

The Wednesday segment stands alone in fair coverage of
the “other side” of the climate debate. It’s the kind of coverage every
other network gives to the alarmists. Communications Director Jim
Lakely's blog post describing the coverage is at Somewhat Reasonable.

Two particularly memorable lines from the Wednesday segment:

“A
torrent of new data is poking very large holes in what the president
has called the scientific consensus about global warming.”and …

“Skeptics
believe [alarmist] statements are demonstrably false. They point to
observable data, not computer modeling, to prove their point.”

The
1,062-page Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts volume
contains thousands of citations to peer-reviewed scientific literature,
concludes rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels are causing “no
net harm to the global environment or to human health and often finds
the opposite: net benefits to plants, including important food crops,
and to animals and human health.”

The full report, individual
chapters, and a Summary for Policymakers can be downloaded in digital
form (PDF) at the Climate Change Reconsidered Web site.

Via email

The Biblical Noah – the first recorded climate adaptationist?

So
Noah had a problem. He foresaw a highly material change in the global
climate coming, but what should he do about it? One strategy would be to
attempt to prevent, or at least mitigate, the Flood. He a had a pretty
good theory as to its cause – the general violence and wickedness of
mankind. So if he could get everyone together and persuade them to be
less violent and wicked, maybe that might do the trick? Obtaining
agreement multilaterally could be difficult, so another option might be
to be very and very visibly holy himself – a kind of unilateral
mitigation – in the hope of shaming/encouraging everyone else to copy
him. Cynicism about human nature spoke against that course, so a variant
of this unilateral mitigation route might have been to try to be extra
specially holy himself – so holy that his efforts, alone, might be
enough to offset everyone else's wickedness. Sadly, Noah's share of the
total human production of virtue/wickedness was rather small, so again
this was unlikely to work.

An alternative strategy might have
been denial. This "Creator" person claimed to be an expert on future
weather patterns and that this Flood thing could be foreseen as
following from some fairly simple principles regarding the consequences
of wickedness and violence, but how reliable could any such prediction
really be? Granted, the amount of rain did appear to have risen somewhat
a few weeks back, but in more recent days had stopped become more
intense, achieving a plateau. Yes, yes – the plateau was at a level
some might describe as "raining cats and dogs" but surely the key point
isn't that the level of rainfall is at an all-time high; rather it is
that it's stopped getting any worse? How do you explain that, eh?
Anyway, someone that Noah's wife's best friend's cousin once bumped into
by the well had explained to her in detail how such periods of intense
rainfall are caused by giant Nephilim throwing rocks at clouds, and
there seemed to be more Nephalim around than usual so that probably
explained the whole thing. Furthermore, if everyone else was being
wicked and violent Noah should probably join in – wouldn't want to miss
out, now, would he?

Noah, however, didn't favour either of these
strategies. He decided to believe the Flood was coming and adapt,
building an ark and gathering animals two-by-two. He didn't pretend that
was going to be cheap – a whole ark's-worth of gopher wood doesn't come
for free. He didn't use up resources in a futile attempt to persuade
the rest of the world to stop being wicked. He didn't boast of his own
holiness "so at least when it comes I'll be able to tell my
grandchildren I tried to prevent it." He didn't squander the food he'd
need to feed his animals in a huge debauched feast so as to appear cool
in front of the other wicked folk. He prepared. He adapted. He survived.

An interesting tale to reflect upon. Perhaps in doing so one might learn something…

The
effects of man-made global warming are reaching epic proportions. Just
how bad has it gotten? Consider this: The Great Lakes are still 52.9%
ice-covered, which is 1,000% above the average. Dating back to 1980, no
other year comes even close.

Worse, according to NOAA
measurements, “Global Sea Ice Extent is 959,000 above the 1981-2010
mean. That is ranked 4th for the day. And that is 4.61% above 'normal.'”

Additionally, “Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is 1,403,000 above the
1981-2010 mean. That is ranked 1st for the day. And that is 23.74% above
'normal.'” It's also this young year's 30th daily record. Clearly,
we've got work to do. Like stocking up on blankets.

Report: CO2 Is Not a Pollutant, Provides ‘Beneficial Impacts’ to Planet

Carbon
dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally occurring chemical compound
that benefits plants and thus, the planet and its inhabitants, according
to a lengthy report released Wednesday by the free-market
Heartland Institute.

“Carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer that
provides many beneficial impacts,” said Craig Idso, one of the lead
authors of the report, when CNSNews.com asked him to name the most
salient finding of the 37 scientists from 12 countries who contributed
to it.

“You can look at thousands of studies – real world data
studies that have actually been conducted that demonstrate beyond any
doubt that higher levels of CO2 are going to increase the productivity
of plants,” Idso said.

“They’re real,” Idso said of the benefits
of CO2. “They’re not imagined. They’re not projected. They’re real, and
they’re occurring now.”

On December 2009, the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) issued a final regulation listing CO2 as one of
the greenhouses gases that is considered a pollutant that “endangers
public health.” The regulation is part of what the EPA says is required
under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA relies heavily in its
environmental assessments on the climate change reports produced by the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which
issued its fifth report in September 2013.

Joseph Bast, president
of the Heartland Institute, said the IPCC report has been “largely
discredited” by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate
Change’s (NIPCC) “Climate Change Reconsidered II” series of reports,
including a 1,000-page report on the physical science of climate change
that was released in 2013.

Fred Singer, report co-author and an
atmospheric and space physicist and climate change expert, said at the
press conference that the models used by IPCC do not reflect the
real-world data about the planet and its warming and cooling trends.

Idso
provided dramatic examples of how CO2 impacts plants, showing images of
small and underdeveloped plants that were exposed to a small amount of
the compound compared with thriving plants with generous leaves and
blossoms and expansive root systems.

“One of the overall
important findings of our report is that atmospheric CO2 is not a
pollutant,” Idso said. “It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that
offers many biosphereric benefits.

“Probably chiefly known among
all of these benefits is that elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 tend to
increase the biomass and productivity of nearly all plants and
ecosystems on earth,” Idso said.

Some of the other findings in the biological impacts report summary include:

* The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth.

In
an uninterrupted display of ignorance. He thinks, for instance,
that warming is going on when it in fact stopped 17 years ago

Twenty-five
years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much,
about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be
dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects.

This
is why, no matter where you live, it is appalling that the US is
debating whether to approve a massive pipeline transporting 830,000
barrels of the world's dirtiest oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
Producing and transporting this quantity of oil, via the Keystone XL
pipeline, could increase Canada's carbon emissions by over 30%.

Who
can stop it? Well, we can, you and I. And it is not just that we can
stop it, we have a responsibility to do so. It is a responsibility that
begins with God commanding the first human inhabitants of the garden of
Eden "to till it and keep it". To keep it; not to abuse it, not to
destroy it.

Throughout my life I have believed that the only just
response to injustice is what Mahatma Gandhi termed "passive
resistance". During the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, using
boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and supported by our friends
overseas, we were not only able to apply economic pressure on the unjust
state, but also serious moral pressure.

People of conscience
need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of
climate change. We can, for instance, boycott events, sports teams and
media programming sponsored by fossil-fuel energy companies. We can
demand that the advertisements of energy companies carry health
warnings. We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities
and cultural institutions to cut their ties to the fossil-fuel industry.
We can organise car-free days and build broader societal awareness. We
can ask our religious communities to speak out.

We can actively
encourage energy companies to spend more of their resources on the
development of sustainable energy products, and we can reward those
companies that do so by using their products. We can press our
governments to invest in renewable energy and stop subsidising fossil
fuels. Where possible, we can install our own solar panels and water
heaters.

We cannot necessarily bankrupt the fossil fuel industry.
But we can take steps to reduce its political clout, and hold those who
rake in the profits accountable for cleaning up the mess.

And
the good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. Young people
across the world have already begun to do something about it. The fossil
fuel divestment campaign is the fastest growing corporate campaign of
its kind in history.

Last month, the General Synod of the Church
of England voted overwhelmingly to review its investment policy in
respect of fossil fuel companies, with one bishop referring to climate
change as "the great demon of our day". Already some colleges and
pension funds have declared they want their investments to be congruent
with their beliefs.

It
was called the March in March. Abbott was pilloried
in abusive placards and righteous speeches, as the green left railed
against Abbott's odious platform.

This week, Christine Milne
praised that sentiment when she fronted the National Press Club. To be
fair, it was a more sophisticated entreaty to voters to ‘‘make the WA
election the turning of the tide; make it the defining moment where Tony
Abbott’s radical, extreme agenda is stopped. Make it the moment, as
[Greens senator] Scott Ludlam said, 'when we take our country back'.’’

While
Milne’s call for action via the ballot box was perfectly defensible,
stripped back, it asserted that the Greens speak for the majority and
that Tony Abbott lacks legitimacy.

But where is the evidence
given that this government has not even served out a single year of its
three-year term nor handed down one budget?

It is not as if the
government has done anything, excluding imperial titles, that can even
be said to be outside its explicit mandate. Like it or not, Abbott's
authority to repeal the carbon and mining taxes, rebalance the budget,
and to stop the boats, could not have been clearer.

The March
rallies so lauded by the Greens were presented as a protest against the
Abbott government. But surely the real beef is with the Australian
people who just six months prior had installed Abbott with a thumping
30-odd seat majority.

Such arguments fail to register it seems on both ends of the spectrum.

If
ever there was an admission to having no empirical basis for a claim,
it was Milne's evoking of the classic Australian movie, The Castle.

"The
vibe of the nation right now is something you can't quite put your
finger on but it's there, it's real, it's powerful, and it's building,"
she claimed.

It is beyond obvious to point out that the hapless
lawyer in the movie had only resorted to "the vibe" because he lacked a
real argument.

Yet some vibes are real. Such as the vibe of genuine concern, bordering on insurrection running through the Greens right now.

Unlike
the former example, this one is based on empirical evidence including
that the Green vote is on the wane, and that as a result, so too is
Milne's grip on the leadership.

One need only look at the recent
evidence such as the humiliating reversal suffered in her home state of
Tasmania in the March state poll where it collapsed by almost 8 per cent
statewide.

It followed a nation-wide drop of 3.3 per cent in the September federal poll.

The
loss of another senator on Saturday could see a move on Milne within
weeks with the two Victorians, Adam Bandt and Richard Di Natale, likely
to step forward.

But even if Ludlam survives, as the late mail
suggests he will, the word from inside the camp is that the Greens are
actively weighing their options, with one figure noting that Bob Brown
surrendered the leadership precisely because he could not guarantee
serving out another six-year term as leader.

Milne's current term
expires at the next election and her colleagues are already discussing
succession. If Milne is looking for a vibe around the place, she might
consider tuning into that one.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

10 April, 2014

Global solar dominance in sight as science trumps fossil fuels (??!!)

Now all they've got to do is get the sun to shine for 24 hours

Solar
power has won the global argument. Photovoltaic energy is already so
cheap that it competes with oil, diesel and liquefied natural gas in
much of Asia without subsidies.

Roughly 29pc of electricity
capacity added in America last year came from solar, rising to 100pc
even in Massachusetts and Vermont. "More solar has been installed in the
US in the past 18 months than in 30 years," says the US Solar Energy
Industries Association (SEIA). California's subsidy pot is drying up but
new solar has hardly missed a beat.

The technology is improving
so fast - helped by the US military - that it has achieved a virtous
circle. Michael Parker and Flora Chang, at Sanford Bernstein, say we
entering a new order of "global energy deflation" that must ineluctably
erode the viability of oil, gas and the fossil fuel nexus over time. In
the 1980s solar development was stopped in its tracks by the slump in
oil prices. By now it has surely crossed the threshold irreversibly.

The
ratchet effect of energy deflation may be imperceptible at first since
solar makes up just 0.17pc of the world's $5 trillion energy market, or
3pc of its electricity. The trend does not preclude cyclical oil booms
along the way. Nor does it obviate the need for shale fracking as a
stop-gap, for national security reasons or in Britain's case to curb a
shocking current account deficit of 5.4pc of GDP.

But the
technology momentum goes only one way. "Eventually solar will become so
large that there will be consequences everywhere," they said. This
remarkable overthrow of everthing we take for granted in world energy
politics may occur within "the better part of a decade".

If the
hypothesis is broadly correct, solar will slowly squeeze the revenues of
petro-rentier regimes in Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, among
others. Many already need oil prices near $100 a barrel to cover their
welfare budgets and military spending. They will have to find a new
business model, or fade into decline.

The Saudis are themselves
betting on solar, investing more than $100bn in 41 gigawatts (GW) of
capacity, enough to cover 30pc of their power needs by 2030 rather than
burning fossil fuel needed for exports. Most of the Gulf states have
comparable plans. That will mean more crude - ceteris paribus - washing
into a deflating global energy market.

Clean Energy Trends says
new solar installations overtook wind turbines worldwide last year with
an extra 36.5GW. China alone accounted for a third. Wind is still ahead
with 2.5 times old capacity but the "solar sorpasso" will be reached in
2021 as photovoltaic (PV) costs keep falling.

The US National
Renewable Energy Laboratory says scientists can now capture 31.1pc of
the sun's energy with a 111-V Solar Cell, a world record but soon to be
beaten again no doubt. This will find its way briskly into routine use.
Wind cannot keep pace. It is static by comparison, a regional niche at
best.

A McKinsey study said the average cost of installed solar
power in the US across all sectors has dropped to $2.59 from more than
$6 a watt in 2010. It expects this fall to $2.30 by next year and $1.60
by 2020. This will put solar within "striking distance" of coal and gas,
it said.

Solar cell prices have already collapsed so far that
other "soft costs" now make up 64pc of residential solar installation in
the US. Germany has shown that this too can be slashed, partly by sheer
scale.

It is hard to keep up with the cascade of research papers
emerging from brain-trusts in North America, Europe and Japan, so many
brimming with optimism. The University of Buffalo has developed a
nanoscale microchip able to capture a "rainbow" of wavelengths and
absorb far more light. A team at Oxford is pioneering use of perovskite,
an abundant material that is cheaper than silicon and produces 40pc
more voltage.

One by one, the seemingly intractable obstacles are
being conquered. Israel's Ecoppia has just begun using robots to clean
the panels of its Ketura Sun park in the Negev desert without the use of
water, until now a big constraint. It is beautifully simple. Soft
microfibers sweep away 99pc of the dust each night with the help of
airflows.

Professor Michael Aziz, at Harvard University, is
developing a flow-battery with funding from the US Advanced Research
Projects Agency over the next three years that promises to cut the cost
of energy storage by two-thirds below the latest vanadium batteries used
in Japan.

He said the technology gives us a "fighting chance" to
overcome the curse of intermittency from wind and solar power, which
both spike and drop off in bursts. "I foresee a future where we can
vastly cut down on fossil fuel use."

Even thermal solar is coming
of age, driven for now by use of molten salts to store heat and release
power hours later. California opened the world's biggest solar thermal
park in February in the Mojave desert - the Ivanpah project, co-owned by
Google and BrightSource Energy - able to produce power for almost
100,000 homes by reflecting sunlight from 170,000 mirrors onto boilers
that generate electricity from steam. Ivanpah still relies on subsidies
but a new SunPower project in Chile will go naked, selling 70 megawatts
into the spot market.

Deutsche Bank say there are already 19
regional markets around the world that have achieved "grid parity",
meaning that PV solar panels can match or undercut local electricity
prices without subsidy: California, Chile, Australia, Turkey, Israel,
Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain and Greece, for residential power, as well
as Mexico and China for industrial power.

This will spread as
battery storage costs - often a spin-off from electric car ventures -
keep dropping. Sanford Bernstein says it may not be long before home
energy storage is cheap enough to lure households away from the grid en
masse across the world.

Utilities that fail to adapt fast will
face "disaster". Solar competes directly. Each year it is supplying a
bigger chunk of peak power needs in the middle of the day when air
conditioners and factories are both at full throttle. "Demand during
what was one of the most profitable times of the day disappears," said
the report. They cannot raise prices to claw back lost income. That
would merely accelerate what they most fear. They are trapped.

Michael
Liebreich, from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says we can already
discern the moment of "peak fossil fuels" around 2030, the tipping point
when the world starts using less coal, oil and gas in absolute terms,
but because they cannot compete, not because they are running out.

This
is a remarkable twist of history. Just six years ago we faced an oil
shock with crude trading at $148. The rise of "Chindia" and the sudden
inclusion of 2bn consumers into the affluent world seemed to be taxing
resources to breaking point. Now we can imagine how China will fuel its
future fleet of 400m vehicles. Many may be electric, charged by PV
modules.

For Germany it is a bitter-sweet vindication. The
country sank €100bn into feed-in tariffs or in solar companies that
blazed the trail, did us all a favour, and mostly went bankrupt,
displaced by copy-cat competitors in China. The Germans have the world's
biggest solar infrastructure, but latecomers can now tap futuristic
technology.

For Britain it offers a reprieve after 20 years of
energy drift. Yet the possibility of global energy deflation raises a
quandry: should the country lock into more nuclear power stations with
strike-prices fixed for 35 years? Should it spend £100bn on offshore
wind when imported LNG might be cheaper long hence?

For the world
it portends a once-in-a-century upset of the geostrategic order. Sheikh
Ahmed-Zaki Yamani, the veteran Saudi oil minister, saw the writing on
the wall long ago. "Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of
oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came
to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will
come to an end not because we have a lack of oil," he told The Telegraph
in 2000. Wise old owl.

School heads are breaking the law if they preach eco agenda, warns British Education Secretary

Headteachers who brainwash children with green propaganda are breaking the law, Michael Gove has suggested.

The
Education Secretary has read ‘with concern’ a report which accused
‘activist’ teaching staff of trying to turn pupils into ‘foot soldiers
of the green movement’. It found the marks children were awarded
in exams depended on ‘parroting’ the green agenda. And many
widely-used textbooks included inaccurate examples.

A spokesman
for Mr Gove said: ‘The Secretary of State read this report with concern.
‘Schools should not teach that a particular political or
ideological point of view is right – indeed it is against the law for
them to do so.’

The study, by a think-tank set up by former Tory
Chancellor Lord Lawson, warned that ‘eco-activists’ in the education
system were urging children to use ‘pester power’ to ensure
parents are forced to adopt lifestyle choices dictated in schools.

‘We
?nd instances of eco-activism being given a free rein within schools
and at the events schools encourage their pupils to attend,’ it said.
‘In every case of concern, the slant is on scares, on raising
fears, followed by the promotion of detailed guidance on how pupils
should live, as well as on what they should think.’

The Global
Warming Policy Foundation report, by Andrew Montford and John Shade,
described the teaching of climate science in British schools as
‘disturbing’.

Mr Montford said: ‘The brainwashing of our children
for political ends is shameful. Those responsible for education in the
UK need to take action and take it quickly.’

The report found
that teaching on ‘sustainability’ and green issues pervaded the whole
curriculum, from French to religious education.

One RE exam asked children to ‘explain actions religious people might take to look after the planet’.

The
marking scheme suggested answers such as: ‘avoid polluting the world’,
‘recycle’, ‘reduce carbon footprint’ – and even ‘protest
when necessary’ and ‘join action groups such as Greenpeace’.

The
report found inaccurate statements in popular geography textbooks, such
as one saying there had been an ‘increase in the number and intensity of
tropical storms’.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change says there is ‘low confidence’ that any increase has taken place.
Many schools are showing films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth,
even though the report says it contains inaccuracies.

And
Education Scotland suggests schools show climate-change disaster movies
such as The Day After Tomorrow – but no films critical of the green
agenda.

Mr Gove’s spokesman added: ‘Ministers are clear that the
new national curriculum must equip young people with the core knowledge
they need to understand the weather, climate, the earth’s atmosphere,
physical geography and the interaction between nature and the
environment.

‘That means in both science and geography, pupils
must learn the facts and processes which underpin public discussion of
climate change. They must not be directed towards a particular
campaigning agenda.’

Green campaigners rejected the report. Adam
Dyster, parliamentary liaison officer at the UK Youth Climate Coalition,
said: ‘The only time when brainwashing is an appropriate term is when
the likes of the Global Warming Policy Foundation deny the scientific
facts of climate change.’

People
should eat fewer baked beans to reduce flatulence which can contribute
to global warming, a minister suggested today. Fears were raised
about the impact of ‘smelly emissions’ caused by Brits eating more beans
than any other country in the world.

Climate change minister Lady Verma said it was an ‘important’ issue and urged the public to ‘moderate our behaviour’.

Concerns have previously been raised about the effect of methane emissions from cows on global warming.

But
in the House of Lords today a Labour peer raised questions about the
impact of human diet on emmisions. Viscount Simon, 73, a Labour
peer who has been a member of the House of Lords for more than 20 years,
voiced his fears about the ‘smelly emissions’.

Lord Simon said:
‘In a programme some months ago on the BBC it was stated that this
country has the largest production of baked beans and the largest
consumption of baked beans in the world.’

He asked Lady Verma:
‘Could you say whether this affects the calculation of global warming by
the Government as a result of the smelly emission resulting therefrom?’

Lady
Verma described his question as ‘so different’ but she appeared to
suggest that people should think twice about over-indulging in baked
beans or any food which causes flatulence.

She added: ‘You do actually raise a very important point, which is we do need to moderate our behaviour.'

A
study last December suggested the total value of baked beans sold in
the previous year had fallen by £20.8 million to £339.3 million in the
UK.

Lord Simon's grandfather Sir John Simon, a Liberal, was given
a peerage in 1940 after serving as Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary
and Chancellor.

A study this week recommended eating baked beans
every day, to help significantly reduce cholesterol and lower the risk
of heart diseases.

Wind and bloating were among the side effects
of those eating the daily portion, although this subsided after a while,
said lead researcher Dr John Sievenpiper from St Michael’s Hospital,
Toronto.

Last month a survey found that tins of baked beans were
the most popular item that Brits took with them when going on foreign
holidays.

Lord Howell speaks up

The exchange over
the impact of beans on global warming came as a senior Tory peer called
on the government to stop trying to prevent climate change altogether.

George
Osborne’s father-in-law Lord Howell of Guildford, a former Foreign
Office minister, said a change in direction of energy policy was
‘overdue’.

The Tory peer said in the House of Lords: ‘Now may be
time to consider switching our colossal expenditure in attempting
mitigation to adaptation to what is widely believed by many of us to
come in the way of more extreme weather.

‘It seems that our
current mitigation efforts seem to be producing no vast improvement in
carbon emissions - in fact an increase in our carbon footprint - burning
more coal, increased fuel poverty, driving investment away from this
country to elsewhere where power is cheaper, raising the prospect of
blackouts and general environmental damage.’

At question time in
the Lords he asked energy minister Baroness Verma: ‘Isn't it becoming
very obvious that some change of direction in our climate and energy
policy is overdue if we are to achieve our green goals?’

Lady Verma said the Government's policy was about ‘both adaptation and mitigation’.

Labour
peer Baroness Worthington said: ‘On discovering a flood in a bathroom
you would not make your priority turning your house into a swimming
pool, you would turn the tap off.

‘That is precisely what we need
to do and I think it is regrettable that we have some prominent members
of the other side (Conservatives) who do not seem to accept it.’

Look who's criticizing Showtime for trying to scare people about global warming

The
New York Times endorsing climate realism? Not exactly. They just think
that trying to scare people about global warming doesn't work and other,
more subtle methods must be used:

If you were looking for
ways to increase public skepticism about global warming, you could
hardly do better than the forthcoming nine-part series on climate change
and natural disasters, starting this Sunday on Showtime. A trailer for
“Years of Living Dangerously” is terrifying, replete with images of
melting glaciers, raging wildfires and rampaging floods. “I don’t think
scary is the right word,” intones one voice. “Dangerous, definitely.”

Showtime’s
producers undoubtedly have the best of intentions. There are serious
long-term risks associated with rising greenhouse gas emissions, ranging
from ocean acidification to sea-level rise to decreasing agricultural
output.

But there is every reason to believe that efforts to
raise public concern about climate change by linking it to natural
disasters will backfire. More than a decade’s worth of research suggests
that fear-based appeals about climate change inspire denial, fatalism
and polarization.

The Times mentions in passing that the IPCC
doesn't believe that there is a connection between climate change and
an increase in severity of natural disasters:

Since then,
evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A
frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed
up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and
large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well
act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the
researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal
engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to
engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment
published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use
“dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the
problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.

But
claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global
warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is,
according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places,
and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel
also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the
loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic
growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled
areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is
the most important driver of increasing losses.”

"Our warming
world" is not warming at the moment, which may be contributing more to
the skepticism about climate change than how scary global warming
hysterics can make climate change sound or look. After experiencing one
of the coldest, most brutal winters since records began to be kept, a
majority of Americans remain unconvinced that the earth is warming. It
hardly matters whether efforts to scare people, or more subtle methods
are used, the climate change crowd is going to have to come up with
better evidence than they are presenting now.

Chevrolet’s
firebrand electric-hybrid vehicle, the Chevy Volt, has so far seen a
dramatically disappointing sales record. Government Motors, however, is
prepared to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into the continued
production of one of America’s least favorite automobiles… Oh, and
they’re also going to introduce a new version of the Volt, with a lower
price point and significantly fewer options.

According to Reuters:

"Chevrolet
has sold just 58,158 Volts since the car went on sale 39 months ago,
despite price cuts and heavy discounting. In comparison, the
best-selling Ford F-series pickup last month sold more than 70,000."

Wow…
That almost makes Obamacare enrollments look like a rousing success.
(Almost.) Of course, the two vehicles are drastically different – making
the comparison is kinda like comparing apples to
spontaneously-combusting oranges. According to sales figures, the
biggest difference between the two vehicles seems to be that people
actually like Ford pickups.

But let’s not let little business
realities (like no one wanting to purchase a heavily subsidized, and
overpriced, electric hybrid) get in the way of throwing some more money
at the problem. Despite the fact that selling the Chevy Volt has proven
to be more difficult than selling overpriced “brosurance” to “young
invincibles”, GM is taking a page from Team Obama’s style of management:
They decided to invest roughly $384 million dollars to expand
production of a “new generation Volt”.

The “new and improved”
model will, of course, be stunningly similar to the current model (ya
know: the model that, apparently, nobody wants to purchase). According
to Reuters:

"The standard Volt won't deviate dramatically from
the current model, which is priced from just under $35,000 and has a
driving range of up to 380 miles, according to Chevrolet."

Inexplicably,
some people actually seem to think that continuing the production of
GM’s embarrassment will yield different sales figures as time goes on.
And, really, it’s a logical conclusion… “Doubling down” is what most
businesses do with products that have failed to capture the imagination
of consumers. Right?

For good measure, and to ensure that their
poor-performing Volt rakes in a couple dozen extra sales each year,
Chevy will also feature a “low cost” edition of the vehicle. The plan is
likely to work (sarcasm font), because there’s nothing quite like
shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for a liberal status symbol
that doesn’t have electric windows. (Especially when a large chunk of
the price of the vehicle is earmarked for the electric power supply.)

The
low cost edition will have less than a 300 mile range, less equipment
and undoubtedly fewer cup holders. (They could probably cut a few more
costs by employing the rarely mentioned “Fred Flintstone” method of
propulsion.) Oh… And it will still cost more than $30,000 for the
privilege of getting behind its wheel. (A $7,500 tax credit didn’t do
the trick… but shaving a few thousand off the price, at the expense of
quality, is going to get sales rolling?)

To the untrained eye,
the Volt’s sales figures pretty much resemble what the average person
would consider “an unmitigated disaster”. Most businesses, after three
years of abysmal sales, would sack the creative team responsible for
pitching the idea, as well as the dreamy eyed managers who gave the
disaster a “thumbs up”…

But, this is Government Motors. Results,
apparently, don’t matter… Maybe GM can set up an online exchange for
Volts if their “less-car-for-slightly-less-money” campaign doesn’t pan
out. (Of course, with our current set of government leaders, I also
wouldn’t rule-out a tax on all consumers who “opt out” of buying a
Volt.)

This
week, Exxon Mobil (XOM) laid out the facts of oil and energy demands
and felt confident enough to say all their reserves will be exploited.
Despite fear-mongering about climate, population, income-inequality and
desperate efforts to redistribute billions of dollars from rich nations
to poor nations, the world's thirst for oil will matter more. In fact,
the world's thirst for oil will be driven by prosperity.

The
proposed policies portray nations that are on the cusp of rapid growth
as feeble and inadequate, when they are anything but that. Not only
should rich nations reject this rhetoric but so, too, those supposed
victims whose growth would be snuffed out with new rules.

Exxon
Mobil has taken information from the International Energy Agency on
reaching the goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by 50%,
below the 2005 level, by the year 2050, and the tally coming in at a
cool $45 trillion. In other words; it simply isn't happening. Moreover,
the UN report on climate change released last week comes to the
conclusion that rich nations in Europe and the United States owe poor
nations $100 billion a year to protect them from the ravages of climate
change. That line of thinking, so incendiary and scuttlebutt was pulled
from the 48-page summary of the report at the request of the United
States.

Yet there have been plenty of quotes from officials involved in the push for global climate change regulations and policies.

"First
of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere
of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de
facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of
coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free
oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is
environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental
policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."
Ottmar Edenhofer

Be that as it may, it's clear that the hype over
renewable sources displacing fossil fuels is a myth, but not for lack
of effort. Wind seems dead, but solar has taken on a life of its own,
and could soon stand without government help, which means there are
investment opportunities. But the big news is that the world will need
oil and gas for the foreseeable future. I really don't think many people
understand just how much longer the demand for fossil fuels will grow.
In addition to China and India, amazing economic growth will spark a
surge in demand from several nations including:

By
2040 there will be 2.6 billion more people on the planet, and the
global economy will grow by 130% according to data from Exxon Mobil. Oil
and gas will meet 60% of energy demand driven by transportation.
Natural gas will displace coal as number two source of energy driven by
90% increase in electricity demand. I do take issue with assumptions
made by Exxon and IEA on nuclear if indeed Japan abandons it completely
and France embarks on plans to cut its reliance by 50%.

The
energy use table underscores the miracle of fossil fuels and evolution
of mankind. First, coal powered the First Industrial Revolution, and
then oil and gases energized the Second Industrial Revolution, although
sadly 2 billion people still need biomass for energy to prepare their
dinners.

(I know hipsters think cooking oil will be the fuel of
the future, but it's a drag, takes a lot of time and effort and can't
power industry. The rich Western biomass crowd is fooling itself in
effort assuage a needless sense of guilt.)

The fracking miracle
will take hold around the world, providing amazing opportunity for
American ingenuity and know-how. In the meantime, the natural gas
phenomenon has stalled for a lack of pipes and infrastructure and that
must change immediately. The time to strike is now!

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

9 April, 2014

Climate 'consensus': Is carbon dioxide the new cholesterol?

As
some readers here know, I also follow the medical literature and what
the writer below says is spot on. Moreover, that is not the only
recent example of a reversed consensus in the medical
literature. The wisdom on peanut allergy has also recently done a
180 degree turn, for instance -- JR

Imagine a public policy
issue that could determine the course of millions of lives. Imagine the
science concerning this issue was complex and confusing. Nonetheless,
most scientists had reached agreement on certain aspects of it.

And
imagine the Washington Post wrote an editorial stating, "Government
agencies must constantly make recommendations on the basis of just this
kind of incomplete but suggestive evidence, and there is a consensus on
what to do."

That sounds like the current debate over climate
change, doesn’t it? Nope. That editorial is from 1980. The issue was not
levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but levels of cholesterol in
the diet.

In that case, the consensus was that the amounts of
saturated fats and cholesterol in the diet are related to the levels of
cholesterol in the blood and "that reducing the one will lower the
other," the Post wrote.

That seemed to be the case at the time.
But there were dissenters who claimed carbohydrates, particularly
refined ones, were the more likely triggers for obesity and heart
disease. That led the mainstream authorities to hold a "Consensus
Conference" in 1984. The result was a national policy emphasizing
low-fat diets as a means of combating obesity and heart disease.

Soon
the market was inundated with low-fat foods. But they weren’t having
the desired effect. By 2002, the cracks in the consensus were so evident
that the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy and well-researched
article by noted science writer Gary Taubes headlined "What if it’s all
been a big fat lie?"

"It used to be that even considering the
possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was
tantamount to quackery by association," Taubes wrote. "Now a small but
growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take
seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along."

Last
month, the prior consensus was turned on its head by a study published
in the Annals of Internal Medicine. A meta-analysis of 76 studies and
clinical trials showed no link between fat, even saturated fat, and
increased heart-disease risk.

I discussed this yesterday with
Meir Stampfer, who is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the
Harvard School of Public Health. Stampfer said the move to low-fat diets
might have actually increased obesity and heart-disease risk. That’s
because people tended to substitute refined carbohydrates for fat in
their diets, Stampfer said.

"Basically what happens is the
refined carbs are very rapidly absorbed," Stampfer said. "Blood sugar
goes up very rapidly and insulin is secreted so it plummets again."

That
rapid fluctuation leads to an increase in triglycerides, which in turn
can lead to weight gain and atherosclerosis, he said. So is there a new
consensus that "Butter is back" as one op-ed piece in the Times recently
stated?

Nope, said Stampfer. He and his Harvard colleagues
disagree with those who are promoting saturated fats from dairy and red
meat. The Harvard crowd argues that people would be better off consuming
more olive oil and seafood.

But that’s a healthy disagreement. As for that prior consensus, the consensus is that it did not hold up.

"This
is complicated and the policymakers tried to make it simple," Stampfer
concluded. "But it’s better to be complicated and right than
simplified and wrong."

It is indeed, and I would encourage my
fellow journalists to keep that in mind in light of the highly touted
"consensus" on the role of carbon dioxide in promoting global warming.

Climate
science is infinitely more complicated than human physiology. Once all
of the data are in, we may find that atmospheric carbon dioxide?
actually has the effect predicted by physicist Freeman Dyson of the
Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. The 90-year-old Dyson, whom
many consider to be the smartest guy on Earth, argues that far from
harming the planet, atmospheric CO-2? may have a positive effect by
increasing plant growth.

Perhaps you disagree. Fine, but you’re
disagreeing with a guy who calculated the number of atoms in the sun
when he was 5 years old and who’s been at the institute since Einstein
was walking the grounds.

Science requires taking the long view,
said Dyson when I called him the other day. "Science of course is
always correcting mistakes," he said. "That’s what it’s all about."

It is indeed. What it’s not about is consensus. That’s for editorial writers.

Some
writers have excoriated the Chinese writers of this paper for being
crooks. That entirely misses the point. The writers were
simply describing what they saw as the norm. And the journal
accepted that

Here is a link to the abstract of a
peer-reviewed article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
(You may be able to download the full article. I could, from my
university computer.)

The abstract says, “It appears that news
media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to
accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. ...
We find that the information manipulation... induces more countries to
participate in an IEA [International Environmental Agreement], which
will eventually enhance global welfare.”

The article argues that
by exaggerating the harmful effects of climate change, advocates can
gain more support for government climate change policies.

The
article says, “Linking climate change to extreme weather may be a
powerful way to motivate people.” Referring to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, it says, “The IPCC has tended to
over-generalize its research results and accentuate the negative side of
climate change. Following its lead, the mainstream media has gone even
further.”

Later, “...it may be better for the countries to hold a
pessimistic view of the climate problem, as it will induce more
countries to participate in the IEA...” The paper then goes on to
develop a mathematical model to demonstrate why this is the case.

The
paper’s conclusion begins, “This article offers a rationale for the
phenomenon of climate damage accentuation or exaggeration on the part of
the international mainstream media or other pro-environmental
organizations.” And then to show the bias of the authors, “Forming a
binding IEA to curb climate change is a matter of urgency... When the
media or pro-environmental organizations have private information on the
damage caused by climate change, in equilibrium they may manipulate the
information to increase pessimism regarding climate damage, even though
the damage may not be that great. Consequently, more countries (with
overpessimistic beliefs about climate damage) will be induced to
participate in an IEA in this state, thereby leading to greater global
welfare...”

The paper concludes, “This article further explores
how the mass media may manipulate the information it privately has to
influence behavior related to the environment ... this article
introduces a novel mechanism, ‘information manipulation.’”

This
article is noteworthy because it is published in a peer-reviewed
academic journal. This is not right-wing political propaganda, and it is
apparent from reading the article that the authors are sympathetic to
the idea that more global action needs to be taken to combat what they
believe are the negative effects of climate change.

The article
is written by advocates of international environmental agreements who
plainly state that climate scientists and the media exaggerate the
negative effects of climate change, and explain why doing so helps
further their goals.

A new report published today
by the Global Warming Policy Foundation is calling for Michael Gove,
the Secretary of State for Education, to institute an official inquiry
into the way environmentalism and in particular climate change are being
taught in schools.

In the report, authors Andrew Montford and
John Shade describe how environmentalism has come to permeate school
curricula across the UK, featuring in an astonishing variety of
subjects, from geography to religious education to modern languages.
Passing examinations will now usually involve the ability to recite
green mantras rather than understanding the subtle questions of science
and economics involved.

The authors review in detail the climate
change teaching materials currently used in British schools, with
disturbing results. There is ample evidence of unscientific statements,
manipulated graphs, and activist materials used in class and even found
in textbooks.

The report also describes how activist teachers try
to make children become the footsoldiers of the green movement,
encouraging them to harass their schoolmates and pester their parents to
bring about “behaviour change”.

The use of fear of climate
change to alter children’s behaviour is also highlighted. This is
undoubtedly having harmful consequences on children’s development and
surveys indicate that fear of the future is widespread. The report
quotes one child as saying:

“I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”

Author
Andrew Montford says: “The brainwashing of our children for political
ends is shameful. Those responsible for education in the UK need to take
action and take it quickly”

.............

Foreword

by Professor Terence Kealy, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham

Politicians
and political activists have always wanted to control the schools, for
obvious reasons. St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits may or may not have
said 'give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man' but
too many politicians have wanted the child until he or she is
seventeen, just to make sure.

In this impressive paper Andrew
Montford and John Shade have shown how effectively eco-activism appears
to have captured our schools' curriculums. It is of course true that the
greenhouse effect is based on good physics, but even better physics
recognises that the globe is a complex system and that many different
effects - not just the greenhouse effect - will influence the climate.
And since we cannot yet model the world's climate with confidence, we
must be suspicious of the certainty with which eco-activists seek to
influence the schools' curriculums.

Eco-activism is, as Montford
and Shade have shown, only the most recent example of attempted
curriculum-capture by political activists, so we need to construct
institutions to protect the schools from such capture. Montford and
Shade have invoked the horrible examples of education under the
communist regimes of Eastern Europe or China, and in so doing they point
the way to the only solid future - democracy.

Educational
researchers such as EG West (Education and the State, 1965) and James
Tooley (The Beautiful Tree, 2009) have shown how the nationalisation of
the schools in England and Wales during the 19th century was a mistake,
which neither increased the expenditure per pupil nor fostered social
justice - it only handed the schools over to John Stuart Mill's
'dominant power in government.'

But the nationalisation of the
schools is now effectively irreversible, so how can we protect the
curriculum within it? One harbinger is provided by the UK Statistics
Authority, which is funded by government but which reports not to a
minister but directly to Parliament. Thus its independence is optimised.
Perhaps we now need a Curriculum Authority, reporting to Parliament via
a select committee, because by its nature a legislature can foster a
wider range of views than can the executive branch of government.

In
the meantime, let us echo the call from Montford and Shade for an
independent review of our current climate curriculum, because if - as
the title of their paper suggests - schools are indoctrinating rather
than educating, we have a problem.

One
of America’s earliest food crops – almonds – is also one of the most
important for commercial beekeepers. Almonds depend on bees for
pollination, but the explosive growth of this bumper crop taxes the very
honeybees the industry needs to thrive.

California’s Central
Valley produces over 80% of the world’s almonds, valued at over $4
billion in 2012. The boom is poised to continue, with new food products
and expanding overseas markets increasing demand to the point that no
young almond trees are available for purchase until 2016.

Demand
for almonds translates into demand for pollination. So every year
commercial beekeepers transport some 60% of all US honeybees to
California’s almond groves in February and March, when it’s still winter
in most other states. It’s one of their biggest challenges.

For
one thing, bee colonies, especially those from northern states, lack
sufficient time to emerge from their heat-conserving winter clusters.
Some beekeepers thus maintain 20,000 to 30,000 hives. Each one requires
careful inspection for diseases and parasites – a meticulous, Herculean
task on such a scale.

Complicating the situation, beekeepers are
trying to work within a large-scale agricultural system, using an insect
whose husbandry practices have changed little since the nineteenth
century. The larger the commercial beekeeper’s stock, the harder it can
be to tend them and recover from financial setbacks in the form of lost
bees.

Almond growers will need 1.5 million hives this year,
estimates Colorado beekeeper Lyle Johnston. “It takes almost all the
commercial bees in the United States,” to pollinate the almond crop, he
says. The payoff can amount to half an individual keeper’s yearly
profit.

However, bees can come back from California “loaded with
mites and every other disease you can think of,” beekeeper Ed Colby
explains. That can often mean bee colony deaths. Last year, US
beekeepers experienced an average 30% overwinter bee loss; some lost 10%
to 15% of their hives, while others lost much more. It’s a normal cost
of doing business, but it can be painful.

Last year’s rate was
higher than normal, and higher than any keeper would want. But it was
not the “bee-pocalypse” that some news stories claimed. The real story
is that efforts to identify a single unifying cause for
higher-than-usual losses have failed. Scientists are discovering that
multiple issues affect bee health.

Urban, suburban and
agricultural “development has reduced natural habitats, clearing out
thousands of acres of clover and natural flowers,” a 60 Minutes
investigative report observed. “Instead, bees are spending week after
week on the road, feeding on a single crop, undernourished and
overworked.”

The migration itself is stressful, notes Glenwood
Springs, Colorado Post-Independent reporter Marilyn Gleason. “First,
there’s the road trip, which isn’t exactly natural for bees, and may
include freezing cold or scorching heat. Bees ship out of Colorado
before the coldest weather, and drivers may drench hot, thirsty bees
with water at the truck wash.”

The convergence in almond groves
of so many commercial bees from all over the country creates a hotbed of
viruses and pathogens that can spread to many hives. The varroa
destructor mite carries at least 19 different bee viruses and diseases,
causing major impacts on bee colonies. Parasitic phorid flies are
another problem, and highly contagious infections also pose significant
threats. The intestinal fungus nosema ceranae, for example, prevents
bees from absorbing nutrition, resulting in starvation.

The
tobacco ringspot virus was likewise linked recently to the highly
publicized problem known as “colony collapse disorder.” CCD occurs when
bees in a colony disappear, leaving behind only a queen and a few
workers. The term originally lumped together a variety of such
“disappearing” disorders recorded in different locales across hundreds
of years, as far back as 950 AD in Ireland. Thankfully, as during past
episodes, these unexplained incidents have declined in recent years and,
despite all these challenges, overall US honeybee populations and the
number of managed colonies have held steady for nearly 20 years.

These
days, perhaps the biggest existential threat to bees is campaigns
purporting to save them. Extreme-green groups like the Center for Food
Safety and Pesticide Action Network of North America are blaming an
innovative new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids for both
over-winter bee losses and CCD.

Allied with several outspoken
beekeepers, the activists are pressuring the Environmental Protection
Agency, Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency and government
regulatory agencies to follow Europe’s lead – and ban neonics. Instead
of protecting bees and beekeepers, however, their campaigns will likely
cause greater harm – because they ignore the multiple threats that
scientists have identified, and because a neonic ban will result in
farmers using pesticides that are more toxic to bees.

The
European Union’s political decision to suspend neonic use came because
France’s new agriculture minister banned their use. That meant French
farmers would be at a distinct disadvantage with the rest of Europe, if
they were the only ones unable to use the pesticide, noted British
environmental commentator Richard North. They could lose $278 million
per season in lost yields and extra pesticide spraying.

So the
French agricultural ministry sought an EU-wide ban on all
neonicotinoids. After several votes and a misleading report on the
science, the European Commission imposed a ban, over the objections of
many other EU members, who note that the evidence clearly demonstrates
the new pesticides are safe for bees.

Years-long field tests have
found that real-world exposures have no observable effects on bee
colonies. Other studies have highlighted other significant insect,
fungal, human and other issues that, singly or collectively, could
explain CCD. Having analyzed scores of 2007-2012 bee death incidents,
Canadian bee experts concluded that “…very few of the serious bee kills
involve neonicotinoid pesticides. Five times as many ‘major’ or
‘moderate’ pesticide-related bee kills were sourced to non-neonic
chemicals.”

In Canada’s western provinces, almost 20 million
acres of 100% neonic-treated canola is pollinated annually by honeybees
and tiny alfalfa leaf-cutter bees. Both species thrive on the crop,
demonstrating that neonics are not a problem. Large-scale field studies
of honeybees at Canadian universities and a bumblebee field study by a
UK government agency found no adverse effects on bees.

Last
October, a team of industry scientists published a four-year study of
the effects of repeated honeybee exposure to neonic-treated corn and
rapeseed (canola) pollen and nectar under field conditions in several
French provinces. The study found similar mortality, foraging behavior,
colony strength and weight, brood development and food storage in
colonies exposed to seed-treated crops and in unexposed control
colonies. This also indicates low risk to bees.

At least two more
major, recently completed university-run field research projects
conducted under complex, costly scientific laboratory guidelines (“good
lab practices”) are awaiting publication. All indications to date
suggest that they too will find no observable adverse effects on bees at
field-realistic exposures to neonicotinoids.

Meanwhile Project
ApisM., a partnership of agro-businesses and beekeepers, has invested
$2.5 million in research to enhance the health of honeybee colonies.
Switzerland-based Syngenta has spent millions expanding bee habitats in
Europe and North America, through Project Pollinator. Bayer has built
bee health centers in Europe and the United States, and Monsanto’s
Beeologics subsidiary is developing technology to fight varroa mites.

None
of that matters to the anti-pesticide activists. They are using
pressure tactics to make Canada and the United States copy the EU. That
would be a huge mistake. Science, not politics, should prevail.

Via email

Doubts raised over IPCC draft backing carbon extraction

Many
nations want a draft UN report to tone down prospects for sucking
greenhouse gases from the air to help fix global warming, reckoning the
technologies are risky, documents seen by Reuters show.

Government
officials and scientists are meeting in Berlin this week to edit the
report, which says time is running out to keep warming below an agreed
ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times.

The
study, focused on solutions to climate change, is meant to guide almost
200 governments in preparing a U.N. pact due by the end of 2015 to curb
rising emissions and help limit heat waves, floods, droughts and rising
seas.

China, the European Union, Japan and Russia were among
nations saying the draft, to be published on Sunday, should do more to
stress uncertainties about technologies that the report says could be
used to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it below
ground to limit warming.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)
"technologies are currently not available and would be associated with
high risks and adverse side-effects," the German government said in a
comment on the draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC).

"There are no CDR technologies by now," Russia said. The
technologies would go far beyond the traditional focus on cutting
emissions from burning coal, oil or natural gas.

Several nations
were especially sceptical about the draft's mention of stripping
greenhouse gases from electricity-generating facilities burning biomass -
wood or other plants - to bury them underground as a way to extract
carbon from nature.

Plants soak up carbon as they grow and
release it when they rot or burn. Chemicals can extract carbon from the
exhaust fumes from burning crop waste, for instance, or from
fermentation of corn to make ethanol.

Among projects, Archer
Daniels Midland has a facility in Illinois to inject 333,000 tonnes of
carbon dioxide a year into the ground from a factory producing ethanol
from corn. Husky Energy in Canada produces carbon dioxide from ethanol
for injection into oil wells.

Many nations said that the draft
should do more to mention drawbacks of bioenergy with carbon capture and
storage (BECCS), such as the amount of land needed to grow plants and
risks that it would compete with food production.

Internal IPCC
documents show that China said BECCS "bears great uncertainties". Japan
said that "considerations of trade-offs with water, land and
biodiversity are crucial to avoid adverse effects" with CDR
technologies.

A sub-chapter of the report says that BECCS has the
theoretical potential to extract as much as 10 billion tonnes a year of
carbon dioxide from nature - roughly equivalent to China's carbon
emissions - but would cost between $US60 ($64) and $US250 a tonne.

Other
methods for extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere include
simply planting trees or fertilising the oceans to promote the growth of
algae, hoping that the tiny carbon-rich plants would fall to the seabed
when they die.

Among other debates in Berlin on Tuesday,
delegates said that Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, objected
to a line in the report pointing out that fossil fuels were the
overwhelming cause of rising emissions in the past decade.

Having
spent decades trying to convince everyone that carbon dioxide (CO2) was
a "greenhouse gas" that was going to cause the Earth to heat up, the
same environmental charlatans are now embarking on a campaign to do the
same with methane. In the U.S. the first move was announced by the White
House in late March.

The carbon dioxide hoax fell apart in the
wake of a cooling cycle affecting the Earth that began around 1997 and
continues to this day. Warming and cooling cycles are natural events and
both are tied to the activity or lack of it of the Sun. Humans
have nothing to do with the climate other to enjoy or endure it.

Why
methane? It has a lot to do with the development of hydraulic
fracturing, commonly called "fracking", and the way it unlocks natural
gas, aka methane, all of which portends an America that is energy
independent, along with its huge reserves of coal and oil. If, of
course, the government permits this to occur.

As we know, the
Obama administration does not want that. It would mean more jobs,
greater prosperity, and the ability to pay down the national debt, not
to mention drive down the cost of electricity, gasoline, and everything
else that depends on energy.

Despite the cooling cycle that is
likely to last for many more years, Steve Hamburg, chief scientist for
the Environmental Defense Fund, was quoted by the Washington Post saying
that "ounce for ounce, methane is 84 times as potent as a greenhouse
gas over 20 years" compared to carbon dioxide. "More than a third of the
warming that we'll see as a result of today's emissions over the next
couple of decades comes from, essentially, methane. We need to remain
focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but doing so is not enough."

Excuse
me, but the Environmental Defense Fund and countless other Green
advocacy groups have been focused on carbon dioxide for decades and the
Earth is cooling, not warming. What part of this does Hamburg not
understand?

James M. Taylor, the managing editor of Environment
& Climate News, a national monthly published by The Heartland
Institute, reported in January that "Natural gas fracking is not causing
a spike in the U.S. methane emissions", citing Environmental Protection
Agency data. "Methane emissions specific to natural gas are in a
long-term decline, down ten percent since 1990 and down seven percent
since 2007 when the fracking boom began."

The Washington Post,
however, asserted that emission levels "are set to rise by 2030 as shale
oil and shale gas production expands in the United States." Do you
remember all those predictions about the increase of carbon dioxide
emissions and how, in ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years, the Earth
would heat up?

This is not about methane, it is about finding a
way to shut down fracking and the extraction of natural gas and oil in
the same way the Obama administration's "war on coal" has caused the
loss of over 150 coal-fired plants that until it began, were providing
electricity. Reducing sources of electricity drives up its cost to
everyone. As more natural gas came on line by 2013 it had become the
second greatest source of U.S. electricity, but overall the amount of
electricity produced was less than in 2007 before the war on coal began.

A
natural component of the Earth, it has a number of sources, but one
that has also caught the eye of government regulators involves cow
flatulence and belching.

The White House has proposed cutting
methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25% by 2020. The
Environmental Protection Agency has been tracking cow farts since 2012
and now the dairy industry has to worry along with the oil and gas
industry. In addition to the EPA, the Bureau of Land Management will be
announcing "new standards this fall to reduce venting and flaring from
oil and gas production on public lands."

It's often best just to
let the Greens speak for themselves, revealing their never-ending
efforts to attack the energy industry that keeps our lights on, heats
and cools our homes, and fuels our cars and trucks. "President Obama's
plan to reduce climate-disrupting methane pollution is an important step
in reining in an out of control industry exempt from too many public
health protections," said Deborah Nardone, the director of the Sierra
Club's Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground campaign.

"However,"
said Ms. Nardone, "even with the most rigorous methane controls in
place, we will still fall short of what is needed to fight climate
disruption if we do not reduce our reliance on these dirty fossil
fuels."

What the heck is a climate disruption? A blizzard, a
hurricane, a flood, tornadoes? None of these phenomena have anything to
do with using fossil fuels. This is the kind of utter drivel we have all
been hearing for decades.

It has nothing to do with the climate
and everything to do with denying access and use of the greatest
reserves of coal, oil and natural gas that exist in the greatest nation
on Earth, the United States of America.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

8 April, 2014

The Little Ice Age Was The Coldest Period For 10000 Years

Jørgen
Peder Steffensen is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen
and one of the world’s leading experts on ice cores. Using ice cores
from sites in Greenland, he has been able to reconstruct temperatures
there for the last 10000 years. So what are his conclusions?

* Temperatures in Greenland were about 1.5 C warmer 1000 years ago than now.

* It was perhaps 2.5 C warmer 4000 years ago.

* The period around 1875, at the lowest point of the Little Ice Age, marked the coldest point in the last 10,000 years.

* Other evidence from elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere confirms this picture.

His final comment is particularly telling :-

"I
agree totally we have had a global temperature increase in the 20thC –
but an increase from what? ..Probably an increase from the lowest point
in the last 10,000 years. We started to observe meteorology at the
coldest point in the last 10,000 years."

Climate change is now a question of adaptation. And it's not as frightening a question as you might think

Nigel
Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies
lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career
as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the
need to adapt to climate change, rather than throw public money at
futile attempts to prevent it. Until now, the official line has been
largely to ignore adaptation and focus instead on ‘mitigation’ — the
misleading term for preventing carbon dioxide emissions.

That has
now changed. The received wisdom on global warming, published by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was updated this week. The
newspapers were, as always, full of stories about scientists being even
more certain of environmental Armageddon. But the document itself
revealed a far more striking story: it emphasised, again and again, the
need to adapt to climate change. Even in the main text of the press
release that accompanied the report, the word ‘adaptation’ occurred ten
times, the word ‘mitigation’ not at all.

The distinction is
crucial. So far, the debate has followed a certain bovine logic: that
global warming is happening, so we need to slow it down by hugely
expensive decarbonisation strategies — green taxes, wind farms. And what
good will this do? Is it possible to stop global warming in its tracks?
Or would all these green policies be the equivalent of trying to blow
away a hurricane? This question — just how much can be achieved by
mitigation — is one not often addressed.

There is an alternative:
accepting that the planet is warming, and seeing if we can adjust
accordingly. Adaptation means investing in flood defences, so that
airports such as Schiphol can continue to operate below existing (and
future) sea level, and air conditioning, so that cities such as Houston
and Singapore can continue to grow despite existing (and future) high
temperatures. It means plant breeding, so that maize can be grown in a
greater range of existing (and future) climates, better infrastructure,
so that Mexico or India can survive existing (and future) cyclones, more
world trade, so that Ethiopia can get grain from Australia during
existing (and future) droughts.

Owen Paterson, the Secretary of
State for the Environment, in repeatedly emphasising the need to adapt
to climate change in this way, has been something of a lone voice in the
government. But he can now count on the support of the mighty IPCC, a
United Nations body that employs hundreds of scientists to put together
the scientific equivalent of a bible on the topic every six years or so.
Whereas the last report had two pages on adaptation, this one has four
chapters.

Professor Chris Field is the chairman of Working Group 2
of the IPCC, the part devoted to the effects of climate change rather
than the cause. ‘The really big breakthrough in this report,’ he says,
‘is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change.’ His
co-chair Vicente Barros adds: ‘Investments in better preparation can pay
dividends both for the present and for the future … adaptation can play
a key role in decreasing these risks’. After so many years, the penny
is beginning to drop.

In his book An Appeal to Reason, Lawson
devoted a chapter to the importance of adaptation, in which he pointed
out that the last IPCC report in 2007 specifically assumed that humans
would not adapt. ‘Possible impacts,’ the report said, ‘do not take into
account any changes or developments in adaptive capacity.’ That is to
say, if the world gets warmer, sea levels rise and rainfall patterns
change, farmers, developers and consumers will do absolutely nothing to
change their habits over the course of an entire century. It is a
ludicrous assumption.

But this assumption was central, Lawson
pointed out, to the estimated future cost of climate change the IPCC
reported. A notorious example was the report’s conclusion that,
‘assuming no adaptation’, crop yields might fall by 70 per cent by the
end of the century — a conclusion based, a footnote revealed, on a
single study of peanut farming in one part of India.

Lawson
pointed out that adaptation had six obvious benefits as a strategy,
which mitigation did not share. It required no international treaty, but
would work if adopted unilaterally; it could be applied locally; it
would produce results quickly; it could capture any benefits of warming
while avoiding risks; it addressed existing problems that were merely
exacerbated by warming; and it would bring benefits even if global
warming proves to have been exaggerated.

Ask yourself, if you
were a resident of the Somerset Levels, whether you would prefer a
government policy of adapting to anything the weather might throw at
you, whether it was exacerbated by climate change or not, or spending
nearly £50 billion (by 2020) on low-carbon technologies that might in a
few decades’ time, if adopted by the whole world, reduce the
exacerbation of floods, but not the floods themselves.

It is
remarkable how far this latest report moves towards Lawson’s position.
Professor Field, who seems to be an eminently sensible chap, clearly
strove to emphasise adaptation, if only because the chance of an
international agreement on emissions looks ever less likely. If you go
through the report chapter by chapter (not that many people seem to have
bothered), amid the usual warnings of potential danger, there are many
sensible, if jargon-filled, discussions of exactly the points Lawson
made.

Chapter 17 concedes that ‘adaptation strategies … can yield
welfare benefits even in the event of a constant climate, such as more
efficient use of water and more robust crop varieties’. Chapter 20 even
acknowledges that ‘in some cases mitigation may impede adaptation (e.g.,
reduced energy availability in countries with growing populations)’. A
crucial point, this: that preventing the poor from getting access to
cheap electricity from coal might make them more vulnerable to climate
change. So green policies may compound the problem they seek to solve.

In
short, there is a great deal in this report to like. It has, moreover,
toned down the alarm considerably. Even the New Scientist magazine has
noticed that the report ‘backs off from some of the predictions made in
the previous report’ and despite the urgings of Ed Davey to sex up the
summary during last week’s meeting in Yokohama, New Scientist noticed
that ‘the report has even watered down many of the more confident
predictions that appeared in the leaked drafts’.

For instance,
references to ‘hundreds of millions’ of people being affected by rising
sea levels were removed from the summary, as were statements about the
impact of warmer temperatures on crops. The report bravely admits that
invasive alien species are a far greater threat to species extinction
than climate change itself. Even coral reefs, the report admits, are
threatened mostly by pollution and overfishing, which might be
exacerbated at the margin by climate change. So why don’t we have
intergovernmental panels on invasive species and overfishing?

As
these examples illustrate, perhaps most encouraging of all, the report
firmly states that the impact of climate change will be small relative
to other things that happen during this century: ‘For most economic
sectors … changes in population, age structure, income, technology,
relative prices, lifestyle, regulation and governance will be large
relative to the impacts of climate change.’ So yes, the world is heating
up. But in many ways, it will be a better world.

The report puts
the global aggregate economic damage from climate change at less than
2.5 per cent of income by the latter years of the century. This is a far
lower number than Lord Stern arrived at in his notorious report of
2006, and this is taking the bleak view that there will be a further
2.5?C rise from recent levels. This is the highest of nine loss
estimates; the average is only 1.1 per cent.

And the IPCC is
projecting two thirds more warming per increment of carbon dioxide than
the best observationally based studies now suggest, so the warming the
IPCC outlines is not even likely with the highest emissions assumption.

In
other words, even if you pile pessimism upon pessimism, assuming
relatively little decarbonisation, much global enrichment and higher
climate ‘sensitivity’ than now looks plausible — leading to more rapid
climate change — you still, on the worst estimate, hurt the world
economy in a century by only about as much as it grows every year or
two. Rather than inflict an awful economic toll, global warming would
make our very rich descendants — who are likely to be maybe eight or
nine times as rich as we are today, on global average — a bit less rich.

To
avoid this little harm, we could go for adaptation — let poor people
get as rich as possible and use their income to protect themselves and
their natural surroundings against floods, storms, potential food
shortages and loss of habitat. Or we could go for mitigation, getting
the entire world to agree to give up the fossil fuels that provide us
with 85 per cent of our energy. Or we could try both, which is what the
IPCC now recommends.

But the one truly bonkers thing to do would
be to go unilaterally into a policy of subsidising the rich to install
technologies that drive up the cost of energy, desecrate the
countryside, kill golden eagles, clear-cut swamp forests in North
Carolina, turn grain into motor fuel, so driving up the price of food
and killing people, and prevent poor people in Africa getting loans to
build coal-fired, cheap power stations instead of inhaling smoke from
wood fires cut from virgin forests.

All this we are doing in this
country, with almost no prospect of cutting carbon emissions enough to
affect the climate. That’s the very opposite of adaptation — preventing
the economic growth that would enable us to adapt while failing to
prevent any climate change.

The report is far from ideal (don’t
worry, Professor Field, I know that endorsement from the likes of me
would kill your career). As Rupert Darwall, author of The Age of Global
Warming, has pointed out, it systematically ignores the benefits of
climate change and makes the unsupported claim that crop yields have
been negatively affected by climate change, its only evidence being
recent spikes in crop prices — a big cause of which was climate policy,
not climate change, in the shape of biofuels programmes that diverted 5
per cent of the world’s grain crop into fuel.

Did you gather from
the press that the report warns of rising deaths from storms and
droughts, falling crop yields, spreading diseases, and all the usual
litany? Did you conclude from this that deaths from storms will
increase, crop yields will fall, and diseases will kill more people? Oh,
how naive can you get!

No, no, no — what they mean is that the
continuing fall in deaths from storms, floods and disease may not be as
steep as it would be without climate change, that the continuing rise in
crop yields may not be as fast as it would be without climate change,
and that the continuing retreat of malaria might not be as rapid as it
would be without climate change. In other words, the world will probably
heat up — but it’s not going to end. It’s going to be healthier and
wealthier than ever before, just a tad less wealthy than it might
otherwise have been. Assuming we do not adapt, that is.

The
IPCC has issued a statement disputing some of the claims about the
sexing up of the Summary for Policymakers made in the Mail on Sunday
yesterday. This is the guts of it:

"The Mail
on Sunday also quotes some passages from the Working Group II Summary
for Policymakers on migration and refugees, wars and conflicts, famine,
and extreme weather, which it claims are “sexed up” from statements in
the underlying report. In doing so it misleads the reader by distorting
the carefully balanced language of the document.

For instance, the Mail on Sunday quotes the Summary as saying climate
change will ‘increase risks of violent conflicts’. In fact the Summary
says that climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent
conflicts by amplifying factors such as poverty and economic shocks. The
Mail on Sunday says the Summary warns of negative impacts on crop
yields, with warming responsible for lower yields of wheat, maize, soya
and rice. In fact the Summary says that negative impacts of climate
change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts, with
wheat and maize yields negatively affected in many regions and effects
on rice and soybean yields smaller in major production regions.

The references to the underlying report cited by the Mail on Sunday in
contrast to the Summary for Policymakers also give a completely
misleading and distorted impression of the report through selective
quotation. For instance the reference to “environmental migrants” is a
sentence describing just one paper assessed in a chapter that cites over
500 papers – one of five chapters on which the statement in the Summary
for Policymakers is based. A quoted sentence on the lack of a strong
connection between warming and armed conflict is again taken from the
description of just one paper in a chapter that assesses over 600
papers. A simple keyword search shows many references to publications
and statements in the report showing the opposite conclusion, and
supporting the statement in the Summary that “Climate change can
indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war
and inter-group violence…”.

The points in the second paragraph
seem to me to fall into the category of "distinctions without a
difference". As for the third, I'm not sure why the number of papers
cited in the chapter is of any relevance at all - the question is how
many papers support the conclusion in the Summary for Policymakers and
how many contradict it. Perhaps readers with the time to do so can
investigate.

More pertinently, one has to wonder about the wisdom
of the IPCC in incorporating woo like this in the report in the first
place. [Woo is a term used among skeptical writers to describe
pseudoscientific explanations}

Update:

Ben Pile has now
responded. Having a bit more space to set out his case, I think he makes
a very strong case that the Summary for Policymakers is sexed up and I
think I see problems here for the reputation of the IPCC's press office:

"The [IPCC's] implication here seems to be that there are lots of other
papers, cited throughout the chapters, which support the SPM’s claims.
If it’s true, it is the IPCC’s problem. I checked the SPM’s claims
against the chapter references cited in the SPM. Moreover, if the
evidence considered by the WGII is contradictory, the contradictory
nature of the evidence should be reflected in the SPM. It wasn’t. We
don’t need to think very deeply about why such an evaluation of the
evidence was omitted.

Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall (Quartet)

Most
of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will
rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same
for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be
right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global
warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However
interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have
almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global
warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a
stubbornly parky [Parky is Northern English slang for uncomfortably
cold] 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and
bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies,
protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after
all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper
science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is
consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are
the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one
of these days.

Some of the utterances of the warmists are
preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared
that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and
ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing?
Similarly, in his 2006 report on the economic consequences of climate
change, Sir Nicholas Stern wrote that, “If we don’t act, the overall
costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least
five per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever.” To the extent
that this sentence means anything, it is clearly wrong (how are we
losing five per cent GDP “now”, before most of the bad things have
happened? How can he put a percentage on “forever”?). It is charlatanry.

Like
most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a
scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and
political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been
inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the
planet.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which
includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a
post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the
truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread
increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a
fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as
early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to
Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its
oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve
dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift,
the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike
of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point
said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These
beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the
1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’
attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most
idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept
of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of
money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept
of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not
have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the
rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental
conference in Stockholm in 1972.

The G7 Summit in Toronto in
1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the
world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in
1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for
not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China
and India, from its rigours.

The final push, brilliantly
described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it,
a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but
the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the
global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world
signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had
just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries
refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World
would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The
developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the
green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies
were hoist by their own petard.

Since then, the international war
against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green
policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU, including
Britain, continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the
latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but
behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of
climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So
the game is up.

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been
too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often
have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”. If they read this
tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful
clarity.

The
campaign to marginalize conservatives and their traditional values has
many facets. Last week, we talked about the efforts in academia to
restrict access to people whose beliefs are not in tune with modern
liberalism, but that is just one small component of an ongoing
multi-front war.

Today, let’s focus on climate change and the
effort by the left to lull you into peaceful acquiescence of a world
view that will allow “people smarter than you” to make massive changes
in our economy in order to protect you from an impending crisis.3677883 Navigator Travel

I
know, I know, it sounds a lot like Obamacare, but the “climate change”
campaign is even more insidious, dangerous and potentially
world-altering. The goal of eliminating fossil fuels would inevitably
reduce civilization to a thin veneer of culture over a primitive
hunting-gathering society (Think “The Hunger Games”). So with such huge
consequences, it would seem a reasonable request to have a debate about
the validity of the science which demands such earth-shattering changes
from society.

But free debate is the last thing that
climate-change proponents want. Instead, they want everyone to accept
“settled science” and move on to the “solution.”

Settled or not,
by now everyone has their own either well-informed or less-informed
opinions about climate change (formerly known as global warming until
the earth stopped warming appreciably), but anyone who is being serious
about the discussion has to admit two things — 1) the earth’s climate is
certainly changing, and 2) we don’t know why.

The first point is
a truism. The earth’s climate is changing now, in 2014, just like it
has always been changing. Climate is a dynamic, not a static system.
Ergo, climate change in itself does not prove anything.

The
second dictum seems to be the sticking point: We don’t know why. True
science should begin with an acknowledgment that all knowledge is
amorphous and subject to change for reasons that may evade detection by
us mere mortals, rather than solid and settled. Yes, we humans have
devised very canny systems to describe approximations of the truth, but
we do not know and are not capable of knowing THE truth.

Unfortunately,
when science is viewed as a tool not for advancement of knowledge, but
for the reform of human behavior, it is useful for certain scientists
and their allies to promote the idea of solid-state, settled science in
order to nudge people to adopt what they consider to be socially
desirable behavior. It’s really not much different from the use of
religion in primitive societies to scare people into toeing the line. If
you question the “settled science” or “settled religion,” you run the
risk of being called, in one case, a “denier,” and in the other case, a
heretic.

Now, I imagine many reasonable people among my readers
are, at this point, saying that surely I am exaggerating. After all,
even though there is some controversy over global warming or climate
change, surely there is room for both sides in the debate.

Not so
quick, Copernicus! Just like there wasn’t room for both sides in the
Middle Ages when we were debating whether the sun revolved around the
earth or not, there is an ever-constricting circle of silent hell for
so-called climate change “deniers” in our society. Don’t take it from
me; consider the policy of the Los Angeles Times, which recently
announced that it won’t publish letters that challenge the scientific
orthodoxy that humans are causing climate change.

The argument by
the Times’ opinion page editor, Paul Thornton, is that “these letters
don’t make it into our pages” because “saying ‘there’s no sign humans
have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a
factual inaccuracy.”

That’s the beauty of orthodoxy. You don’t
have to allow any competing points of view to interfere with what
you already know to be true. Thornton said he didn’t even need to think
for himself; all he had to do was “rely on the experts.” Maybe not the
same experts as those papists who lit Giordano Bruno at the stake and
came perilously close to doing the same thing to Galileo Galilei, but
experts who are just as afraid of dissent and debate.

Not
surprisingly the condemnation of unorthodox points of view has a
chilling effect on debate, scientific or otherwise. The church burned
Bruno for just that purpose — to make of him an example, so that fellow
scientists like Galileo would step back into line and say what everybody
already knew was true — the earth is the center of the universe. Thank
God that some people challenge the “experts” or else we would still be
living in the Middle Ages today.

Or maybe we are. Lawrence
Torcello, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of
Technology, recently wrote an article at theconversation.com where he
asked, “Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?”

You
already know the answer. If a conservative speaks out in opposition to
liberal orthodoxy, he or she is immediately branded as foolish, corrupt
or criminal. Neither truth nor untainted motives are mitigating factors.
As Torcello sees it, being part of a well-funded campaign to explain
the flaws of prevailing climate-change theory means you are criminally
negligent because you are impeding the public’s ability to resist the
allegedly horrific and deadly effects of climate change. Apparently, the
freedom to resist a prevailing orthodoxy diminishes inversely to the
level of risk imputed by the theory in dispute. Who knows, maybe the
climate change theorists are right? Maybe there will be more deaths in
coming years, but wouldn’t it be funny if the increased deaths were
caused by burning at the stake all those climate deniers who are so
dangerous?

Panic is the last refuge of an orthodoxy under attack.
Adam Weinstein of Gawker.com took up Torcello’s torch, and carried it
down the road apiece.

“Man-made climate change happens,”
Weinstein insists. “Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s
going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone
whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the
climate-change liars.”

He goes on with a genuine passion for chaos that is almost hypnotic:

“Attempts
to deceive the public on climate change, and to consequently block any
public policy to tackle it, contribute to roughly 150,000 deaths a year
already,” Weinstein claims. “Those denialists should face jail. They
should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people
whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.”

Of
course, both Weinstein and Torcello almost apologetically explain that
they don’t want to lock up “the man on the street” who is just spouting
“a socialist United Nations conspiracy” he read somewhere on the
Internet. Weinstein dismisses that man — the man on the street — you and
your neighbor — as “an idiot” not worth worrying about.

But, of
course, they do worry. They worry enough to threaten to arrest you, or
if not you, then the people who you rely on for an alternative viewpoint
to the prevailing orthodoxy of climate doom. They worry enough to keep
you out of the Los Angeles Times, and no doubt other liberal newspapers.
They are worried, or they wouldn’t be trying to scare you with
intimidation and insults.

New paper studies Ordovician Ice Age, which occurred when CO2 was 11 times higher than the present

A
paper published today in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology,
Palaeoecology studies the timing of the onset of the late Ordovician ice
age, which occurred when CO2 levels were more than 11 times higher than
the present.

The late Ordovician ice age occurred around 450
million years ago, when temperatures plunged 10C from "greenhouse
conditions" despite CO2 levels of around 4500 ppm in comparison to
today's level of 400 ppm, demonstrating that CO2 is not the "control
knob" of climate.

In fact, the entire geological record
demonstrates a disconnect between temperature and CO2 levels, but
excellent agreement with the change in cosmic rays, which is a proxy of
solar activity.

................

Oxygen isotopes from Conodont Apatite of the midcontinent, us: implications for late ordovician climate evolution

Page C. Quinton

Abstract

The
major glaciation at the end of the Ordovician is associated with the
2nd largest mass extinction event of the Phanerozoic. Growth of Late
Ordovician ice sheets requires a dramatic cooling from the ‘greenhouse’
conditions that prevailed for most of the Ordovician, but when and how
fast this cooling occurred is controversial. The controversy is due in
large part to a lack of good geochemical constraints on the temperature
history of the Katian (453–445.2 Ma). To address this uncertainty, we
measured phosphate ?18O values from 3 conodont species collected from
sections in the midcontinent region of the United States that span an ~
5.7 m.y. long interval covering most of the Katian.

Results
reveal a statistically significant offset in ?18O values between some
taxa and show up to 2‰ differences among samples. However, there are no
apparent long-term trends within or between sections; rather, values
fluctuate around a ? 18O mean of ~ 19‰ VSMOW. Our study provides the
longest, relatively high resolution, species specific conodont record
generated for this interval, and we found no evidence supporting
progressive cooling during the Katian.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

The
professor who refused to sign last week’s high-profile UN climate
report because it was too ‘alarmist’, has told The Mail on Sunday he has
become the victim of a smear campaign.

Richard Tol claims
he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation by a key figure
from a leading institution that researches the impact of global warming.

Prof Tol said: ‘This has all the characteristics of a smear campaign. It’s all about taking away my credibility as an expert.’

Prof
Tol, from Sussex University, is a highly respected climate economist
and one of two ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of an important chapter in
the 2,600-page report published last week by the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He has been widely criticised by
green campaigners after he claimed that the much shorter ‘summary for
policymakers’ – hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists
and government officials over a week-long meeting in Yokohama, Japan –
was overly ‘alarmist’.

In his view, the summary focused on ‘scare stories’ and suggestions the world faced ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’.

He
said he did not want his name associated with it because he felt
‘uncomfortable’ with the way the summary exaggerated the economic
impact of global warming.

The source of the alleged smear
campaign is Bob Ward, director of policy at the London School of
Economics’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. [Ward
has a first degree in geology only]

Mr Ward – neither an
economist nor a climate expert – claimed on the institute’s website that
he was waging ‘an ongoing struggle’ to force Prof Tol to correct
‘errors’ in his work.

Mr Ward had earlier sent an email disparaging Prof Tol’s research to several leading IPCC scientists and officials.

They
included Prof Tol’s fellow co-ordinating lead author, Doug Arent,
director of America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory; and
Professor Chris Field of Stanford University, the overall chairman
and editor of the IPCC report.

The email claimed that Prof Tol’s
‘antics’ were ‘likely to reflect badly on the IPCC and his
co-authors’. In response Professor Arent informed Mr Ward that the
chapter he co-ordinated with Prof Tol was ‘double and triple
checked’.

He added that after Mr Ward – one of the IPCC’s
registered ‘reviewers’ – found a tiny, statistical error in
an earlier draft, it was revised.

On the website, Mr Ward
said he spotted errors in three of Prof Tol’s papers in October and
raised them in an email to him. But according to Mr Ward, Prof Tol
‘refused to give any undertaking to correct them’. In one email seen by
this paper, Mr Ward admits the errors are ‘small’. Mr Ward added
that after further correspondence, Prof Tol ‘seemed determined not to
correct his papers’.

Yet weeks before Mr Ward published his
article, Prof Tol volunteered to correct a handful of highly technical,
minor numerical mistakes. And almost a month before Mr Ward’s article
appeared, a scientific journal had asked him to write his own article,
saying what he found wrong with Prof Tol’s work.

Prof Tol said
yesterday: ‘Ward claims I refused to correct errors, but it’s not true.’
He added that the errors made no difference to his conclusion that
global warming of up to 2.5C may have a net beneficial impact on the world economy.

Ward
admitted yesterday that the journals which published Tol’s papers told
him weeks ago that he was prepared to correct some of his alleged
errors, and that he had been asked to write a paper of his own.

He
denied his actions were a smear campaign, insisting he was merely
fulfilling his role as an IPCC reviewer and claiming that he still did
not know which ‘errors’ Tol was prepared to correct. He said: ‘If Tol
thinks I am engaged in a smear campaign because I have pointed out his
errors he is redefining what a smear campaign means. It is his behaviour
that is unreasonable.’

He said that Tol had called him an ‘attack dog’ in his own blog and that this was ‘abusive’.

According
to Raj Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), its report last week was its most terrifying yet,
portending famine, disease, extreme weather and wars, proving ‘no one on
this planet is going to be untouched’.

But a Mail on Sunday
analysis shows that the 47-page ‘summary for policymakers’ of a much
more detailed 2,600-page document – ‘sexed up’ some of the key findings.

Its ‘alarmist’ spin led Professor Richard Tol to demand his name be removed from it.

Neither
report covers the science of climate change, only possible impacts.
Many of these, the full document admits, are difficult to forecast.

In any case, computer models say the world should already be warmer – as this newspaper has reported many times.

The
strangest thing about the summary is the way it was produced. For seven
days, about 200 people – 120 of them government officials, not
scientists – sat in a hall in Yokohama, Japan, trying to hammer out a
final draft reflecting the full text.

Big issues were not
resolved until the final session, which started at 9.30pm and ended at
10am next day. Long before that, many delegates had left or fallen
asleep. ‘Important decisions were made by a handful of countries which
were still there, including the UK and US,’ says one source. ‘It’s no
wonder the summary isn’t a true reflection of what the scientists
wrote.’

Real cost of Climate McCarthyism, apart from big bills, is to free speech

At
the heart of the current, poisoned debate about global warming lies a
paradox. Thanks to the ‘pause’, the unexpected plateau in world surface
temperatures which has now lasted for 17 years, the science is less
‘settled’ than it has been for years.

Yet, despite this
uncertainty, those who use it to justify a range of potentially ruinous
energy policies have become ever more extreme in their pronouncements.
Their latest campaign is an attempt to silence anyone who disagrees.

This
reached a new and baleful milestone last week, with a report from the
Commons Science and Technology Committee saying BBC editors must obtain
special ‘clearance’ before interviewing climate ‘sceptics’.

The
committee’s chairman, Labour MP Andrew Miller, likened sceptics to the
Monster Raving Loony Party, suggesting they should be allowed to express
their views with similar frequency.

High profile commentators,
including the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, often
describe climate change sceptics as ‘deniers’, on a par with those who
reject evidence of the Holocaust.

One Sunday columnist recently
insisted the parallel was exact, because the evidence of global warming
is as strong as that for Auschwitz.

Academics who deviate
from the perceived ‘correct’ line risk vilification. The most recent
example is Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who had the
temerity to remove his name from a UN climate report because he said it
was ‘alarmist’.

Another is Prof Roger Pielke Jnr of Colorado. His
‘crime’ is to have published evidence that, so far, hurricanes have not
become more frequent, while financial losses from extreme weather have
not increased as a result of climate change. His reward has been an
organised campaign demanding he be sacked.

The Breakthrough
Institute – an influential, and very green – US think tank has described
those who try to close down debate in this way as ‘climate
McCarthyites’, after the infamous 1950s Senator who sought to root out
Communists from American public life.

It is an increasingly apt
analogy. Miller, Davey and their allies often cite a study showing that
97 per cent of academic papers dealing with climate say that
human-induced global warming is real.

But here is the
thing: so do almost all of those attacked as ‘deniers’, including Lord
Lawson, whose appearance on the Radio 4 Today show in February sparked
the current furore over sceptics getting airtime.

Where they differ from the supposed mainstream is not over the existence of warming, but its speed, and how to deal with it.

Then,
so do many scientists. The ‘pause’ means that the climate computer
models, on which most forecasts are based, say the world should already
be rather warmer than it is: in one expert’s words, they are ‘running
too hot’.

Why is this? Many scientists are engaged in honest
attempts to answer this question. Some suggest that the ‘climate
sensitivity’ – a measure of how much the world will warm in response to a
given increase in carbon dioxide – may be significantly lower than was
widely believed only a few years ago.

Moreover, the response to
rising CO2 adopted thus far palpably has not worked. The emissions cuts
agreed by the EU and other countries at the 1997 Kyoto Treaty and
imposed by our own Climate Change Act have made energy more expensive,
and exported jobs and prosperity to countries such as China – which adds
billions of watts of coal fired power to its grid each year. CO2
emissions have continued to rise.

The architects of such policies
know they have failed, but they have no alternative except more of the
same. Maybe it’s because their argument is weak that they resort to
climate McCarthyism. The cost, apart from higher energy bills, is to
democracy, and free speech.

Climate scaremongers are still twisting the evidence over global warming

When
future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming
that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will
puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder
why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global
temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and
1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see
these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the
start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age,
when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.

They will be
struck by the extent to which this scare relied on the projections of
computer models, which then proved to be hopelessly wrong when, in the
years after 1998, their predicted rise in temperature came virtually to a
halt. But in particular they will be amazed by the almost religious
reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by then will be
recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all, but a
political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small
band of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically
committed to the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising,
global temperatures must inevitably follow; an assumption that the
evidence would increasingly show was mistaken.

Five times between
1990 and 2014 the IPCC published three massive volumes of technical
reports – another emerged last week – and each time we saw the same
pattern. Each was supposedly based on thousands of scientific studies,
many funded to find evidence to support the received view that man-made
climate change was threatening the world with disaster – hurricanes,
floods, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels and the rest. But each
time what caught the headlines was a brief “Summary for Policymakers”,
carefully crafted by governments and a few committed scientists to hype
up the scare by going much further than was justified by the thousands
of pages in the technical reports themselves.

Each time it would
emerge just how shamelessly these Summaries had distorted the actual
evidence, picking out the scary bits, which themselves often turned out
not to have been based on proper science at all. The most glaring
example was the IPCC’s 2007 report, which hit the headlines with those
wildly alarmist predictions that the Himalayan glaciers might all be
gone by 2035; that global warming could halve African crop yields by
2050; that droughts would destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest.
Not until 2010 did some of us manage to show that each of these
predictions, and many more, came not from genuine scientific studies but
from scaremongering propaganda produced by green activists and lobby
groups (shown by one exhaustive analysis to make up nearly a third of
all the IPCC’s sources).

Most of the particularly alarmist
predictions came from a report by the IPCC’s Working Group II. This was
concerned with assessing the impact on the world of those changes to the
climate predicted by the equally flawed computer models relied on by
Working Group I, which was charged with assessing the science of climate
change. The technical report published last week was its sequel, also
from Working Group II, and we can at once see, from its much more
cautious treatment of the subjects that caused such trouble last time,
that they knew they couldn’t afford any repeat of that disaster.

Looking
at the Summary for Policymakers, however, we see how the scaremongers
are still playing their same old game. On pages 12-14, for instance,
they are still trying to whip up fears about extreme weather events,
killer heatwaves, vanishing tropical islands, massive crop failures and
so on, although little of this is justified by the report itself, and
even less by the evidence of the real world, where these things are no
more happening as predicted than the temperature rises predicted by
their computer models.

This latest report has aroused markedly
less excitement than did its hysterical predecessor in 2007. They have
cried wolf once too often. The only people still being wholly taken in,
it seems – apart from the usual suspects in the media – are all those
mindless politicians still babbling on about how in Paris next year they
are finally going to get that great global agreement which, if only we
put up enough wind farms and taxes, will somehow enable us to stop the
climate changing.

They can dream on. But alas, the rest of us must still pay the price for their dreams.

If the goal is “energy independence,” what issues should be a priority in America?

Recently
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) sent out a “2014
Priority Issues Survey.” In addition to the obligatory Tea Party
bashing: “help the Democrats protect the progress we have made from Tea
Party radicals, deliver the positive changes America needs and help
Democrats win a Majority in the U.S. House of Representatives!” and the
fundraising requests to “help protect House Democrats against Republican
attacks”—there is a section on energy.

Section VII, asks: “Which
of the following will help America achieve energy independence?” It
offers five options that do little to move America toward energy
independence—which isn’t even a realistic goal given the fungible nature
of liquid fuels. Additionally, most of the choices given on the DCCC
survey actually increase energy costs for all Americans—serving as a
hidden tax—but hurt those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale
the most. The proposals hurt the very people the party purports to
champion.

The survey asks respondents to “check all that apply.”

-Raising gas mileage standards for all new cars and trucks

This
choice presumes that making a law requiring something will make it
happen. Sorry, not even the Democrats have that kind of power. Even the
current Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standard of 54.5 miles per
gallon (mpg) by 2025—finalized on August 28, 2012 and called “the
largest mandatory fuel economy increase in history”—will be tough to
hit.

The CAFE standards mean that a carmaker's passenger vehicle
fleet average must achieve 54.5 mpg. To meet that, and produce the big
pick-up trucks and SUVs Americans like to drive, the manufacturers must
also produce the little itty-bitty cars with mpg above 60 and the more
expensive hybrids (not one of which was on the top ten best-seller list
for 2013)—or have a loss leader like the Chevy Volt to help bring down
the average.

Suggesting a forced raising of gas mileage standards
implies that auto manufacturers are in collusion with oil companies and
are intentionally producing gas guzzlers to force Americans into buying
lots of gasoline.

With the price of gasoline wavering between
$3-4.00 a gallon, most people are very conscious of their fuel
expenditures. If it were technologically possible to build a
cost-effective truck or SUV that had the size and safety Americans want
and that got 50 mpg, that manufacturer would have the car-buying public
beating a path to its door. Every car company would love to be the one
to corner that market—but it is not easy, it probably won’t be possible,
and it surely won’t be cheap.

When the new standards were
introduced in November 2011, Edmonds.com did an analysis of the
potential impact: 6 Ways New CAFE Standards Could Affect You. The six
points include cost and safety and highlights some concerns that are not
obvious at first glance.

Achieving the higher mileage will
require new technologies that include, according to Edmunds,
“turbochargers and new generations of multispeed automatic transmissions
to battery-electric powertrains.” The National Highway Traffic Saftey
Administration and the Environmental Protection Agencyhave estimated
that the average new car will cost $2,000 extra by 2025 because of the
proposed new fuel-efficiency standards.

Additionally, new
materials will have to be used, such as the proposed new Ford F-150 made
with aluminum, which is predicted to add $1500 over steel to the cost
of a new truck. Aluminum also complicates both the manufacturing and
repair processes. Edmunds reports: “Insurance costs could rise, both
because of the increased cost of cars and the anticipated hike in
collision repair costs associated with the greater use of the plastics,
lightweight alloys and aluminum necessary for lighter, more
fuel-efficient vehicles. (Plastics, lightweight alloys and aluminum are
all more difficult than steel to repair.)”

Another concern is
safety. “The use of weight-saving materials will not only affect repair
costs but could make newer vehicles more susceptible to damage in
collisions with older, heavier vehicles, especially SUVs and pickups.
Their occupants could be at a safety disadvantage.”

One of the
subtle consequences of high mileage vehicles is the probable increase in
taxes. Edmunds points out that lower driving cost may increase
wear-and-tear on the nation’s highway system as consumers drive more
freely. “Declining gas sales mean a further decrease in already
inadequate fuel-tax revenue used to pay for road and infrastructure
repair and improvement. … As more untaxed alternative fuels such as
compressed natural gas and electricity are used for transportation, fuel
tax revenue falls even farther. All of this is likely to lead to calls
for a road tax based on miles driven and not the type of fuel used.”

Instead
of increasing costs by forcing a higher mpg, a free-market encourages
manufacturers to produce the cars the customers want. The Wall Street
Journal story on the Ford F-150s points out: “In 2004, as the auto
market soared, Ford sold a record 939,511 F-series pickups. That
amounted to 5.5% of the entire U.S. vehicle market. But four years
later, gas prices rose above $4 a gallon, sales of pickups began
tumbling.” Then, consumers wanted small cars with better mileage. I
often quote an ad for Hyundai I once saw. As I recall, it said: “It’s
not that complicated. If gas costs a lot of money, we’ll produce cars
that use less of it.”

In response to an article in US News on the
5.45-mpg CAFE standard, a reader commented: “ALL CAFE regulations
should be repealed. Let the market and fuel prices decide what vehicles
are purchased. The federal government should not be forcing mileage
standards down the throats of the automaker or the consumers. This is
still America, right?”

-Develop Renewable Energy Sources

There
is nothing inherently wrong with the idea renewable energy. However,
the cost factor is one of the biggest problems. When I do radio
interviews, people often call in and point out Germany’s renewable
energy success story: “The share of renewable electricity in Germany
rose from 6% to nearly 25% in only ten years.” While that may be true,
it doesn’t address the results: “Rising energy costs are becoming a
problem for more and more citizens in Germany. Just from 2008 to 2011
the share of energy-poor households in the Federal Republic jumped from
13.8 to 17 percent.”

Germany has been faced with a potential
exodus of industry as a result of its high energy costs. For example, in
February, BASF, the world’s biggest chemical maker by sales, announced
that for the first time, it “will make the most of its capital
investments outside Europe.” According to the Financial Times, Kurt
Bock, BASF chief executive explained: “In Europe we have the most
expensive energy and we are not prepared to exploit the energy resources
we have, such as shale gas.”

Throughout America people are
beginning to feel the escalating costs of the forced renewable energy
utility companies are required to add as a result of Renewable Portfolio
Standards that more than half of the states passed nearly a decade ago.

But
the cost is not where I take issue with the DCCC’s inclusion of
“Developing renewable energy sources” in its survey. The survey question
is about achieving “energy independence.”

In preparation for
writing this column, I posted this question on my Facebook page: If the
goal is “energy independence,” what issues should be a priority in
America? The first answer posted was: “Smart grid and fast ramp natural
gas turbines.” Another offered: “High efficiency appliances and lights. I
am a LED FAN!” Yet, another: “Solar, tidal, water.” Bzzzzzzt, all wrong
answers.

All of the above suggestions are about electricity. The
U.S. is already electricity independent. We have enough coal and
uranium under our soil to provide for our electrical needs for the next
several centuries. Add to that America’s newfound abundance of natural
gas and we are set indefinitely. By the time we might run out of fuel
for electricity, new technologies will have been developed based on
something totally different, and, I believe, something that no one is
even thinking about today.

Consumers
are already feeling the pinch of higher energy costs—both electricity
and liquid fuels. When possible, people are restricting driving by
taking a stay-cation rather than a traditional vacation. Many people who
can afford the option are switching to more energy-efficient light
bulbs.

As the BASF story above makes clear, most industry is
energy intensive. In the story about the Ford F-150’s use of aluminum,
the WSJ says that the new manufacturing process requires “powerful and
electricity-hungry vacuums.” Industry cannot stay in business without
profit. Therefore, in interest of preservation, energy conservation is
virtually an instinct.

The cost of energy drives conservation.

Including this question in the survey is a red herring that would lead the respondent to think conservation is a big issue.

-Investing in energy efficient technology

When
the word “investing” is used in reference to a government document or
program, it always means spending taxpayer dollars. In a time of ongoing
economic stress, we don’t need to borrow more money to spend it on
something of questionable impact on energy independence.

Remember,
much of the “efficiency” numbers bandied about refer to electricity,
which has nothing to do with energy independence. Energy.gov states:
“Every year, much of the energy the U.S. consumes is wasted through
transmission, heat loss and inefficient technology…Energy efficiency is
one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to … improve the
competitiveness of our businesses and reduce energy costs for consumers.
The Department of Energy is working with universities, businesses and
the National Labs to develop new, energy-efficient technologies while
boosting the efficiency of current technologies on the market.” Among
the “solutions” presented on the page are “developing a more efficient
air conditioner” and “a new smart sensor developed by NREL researchers
that could help commercial buildings save on lighting and ventilation
costs.” Nothing is offered that will actually impact energy
independence.

-Increasing offshore drilling and oil exploration in wilderness areas

Respondents
are discouraged from selecting the one item on the list that could
actually lead to “energy independence” by the inclusion of the words
“offshore” and “wilderness areas”—as if those are the only places
drilling could take place.

Yes, we should increase exploration
and drilling—and, while there are risks, it can be, and has been, done
safely in offshore and wilderness areas. But there are vast resources
available on federal lands that are either locked up or are under a de
facto ban due to the slow-walking of drilling permits.

Instead of
phrasing the choice “Increasing offshore drilling and oil exploration
in wilderness areas,” if the goal is energy independence, the option
should have read: “Release America’s vast energy resources by expediting
permitting on federal lands.”

~~~

While the options on
the DCCC survey, even if a respondent checked them all, will do little
to “help America achieve energy independence,” the survey didn’t include
any choices that could really make a difference in America’s reliance
on oil from hostile sources.

Some selections that would indicate a true desire to see America freed from OPEC’s grip should include:

-Approving the Keystone pipeline;

-Revising the Endangered Species Act so that it isn’t used to block American Energy Development;

-Encouraging the use of Compressed Natural Gas as a transportation fuel
in passenger vehicles and commercial trucks;

The
fact that not one of these options that would truly make a difference
was included belies the ideology of the Democrat Party. Its goals do not
include energy independence. Instead it wants to continue the crony
corruption that has become the hallmark of the Obama Administration as
evidenced by Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz’s April 2 announcement
that: “the department would probably throw open the door for new
applications for renewable energy project loan guarantees during the
second quarter of this year.”

Like the Ukraine, until there is a
change at the top, the U.S. will likely remain dependent on the whims of
countries who want to use energy as a weapon of control. The goal
should be energy freedom.

New paper finds sea surface temperatures were controlled by natural 60-year climate cycle during 20th century

A
paper published today in Theoretical and Applied Climatology finds that
the natural 60-year climate cycle explains both the abrupt warming
shifts of sea surface temperatures in 1925/1926 and 1987/1988 [60 years
apart], as well as the remaining temperature variability during the last
century.

According to the authors, "warming of sea surface
temperatures (SST) since 1900, did not occur smoothly and slowly, but
with two rapid shifts in 1925/1926 and 1987/1988," but that "apart from
these shifts, most of the remaining SST variability can be explained by
the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
(PDO)."

The authors find "the timing of these two SST shifts (the
natural 60 year cycle ) corresponds well to the quasi-periodicity of
many natural cycles, like that of the PDO, the global and Northern
Hemisphere annual mean temperature, the Atlantic Multi-decadal
Oscillation, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, the Southwest US
Drought data, the length of day, the air surface temperature, the
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and the change in the
location of the centre of mass of the solar system" and that the
characteristics of these two abrupt shifts are "frequently encountered
in a large variety of natural systems."

.........

Evidence for two abrupt warming events of SST in the last century

Authors: Varotsos, Costas et al.

Abstract:

We
have recently suggested that the warming in the sea surface temperature
(SST) since 1900, did not occur smoothly and slowly, but with two rapid
shifts in 1925/1926 and 1987/1988, which are more obvious over the
tropics and the northern midlatitudes. Apart from these shifts, most of
the remaining SST variability can be explained by the El Niño Southern
Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Here, we
provide evidence that the timing of these two SST shifts (around 60
years) corresponds well to the quasi-periodicity of many natural cycles,
like that of the PDO, the global and Northern Hemisphere annual mean
temperature, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, the Inter-Tropical
Convergence Zone, the Southwest US Drought data, the length of day, the
air surface temperature, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
and the change in the location of the centre of mass of the solar
system.

In addition, we show that there exists a strong seasonal
link between SST and ENSO over the tropics and the NH midlatitudes,
which becomes stronger in autumn of the Northern Hemisphere.

Finally,
we found that before and after each SST shift, the intrinsic properties
of the SST time series obey stochastic dynamics, which is unaffected by
the modulation of these two shifts. In particular, the SST fluctuations
for the time period between the two SST shifts exhibit 1/f-type
long-range correlations, which are frequently encountered in a large
variety of natural systems. Our results have potential implications for
future climate shifts and crossing tipping points due to an interaction
of intrinsic climate cycles and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

This
week, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) is releasing its latest report, the “Working Group II
Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report.” Like its past reports,
this one predicts apocalyptic consequences if mankind fails to give the
UN the power to tax and regulate fossil fuels and subsidize and mandate
the use of alternative fuels. But happily, an international group of
scientists I have been privileged to work with has conducted an
independent review of IPCC’s past and new reports, along with the
climate science they deliberately exclude or misrepresent.

Our
group, called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
(NIPCC), was founded in 2003 by a distinguished atmospheric physicist,
S. Fred Singer, and has produced five hefty reports to date, the latest
being released today (March 31).

So how do the IPCC and NIPCC
reports differ? The final draft of the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers
identifies eight “reasons for concern” which media reports say will
remain the focus of the final report. The NIPCC reports address each
point too, also summarizing their authors’ positions in Summaries for
Policymakers. This provides a convenient way to compare and contrast the
reports’ findings.

Here’s what the reports say:

IPCC:
“Risk of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal
zones and small island developing states, due to sea-level rise, coastal
flooding, and storm surges.”

NIPCC: “Flood frequency and
severity in many areas of the world were higher historically during the
Little Ice Age and other cool eras than during the twentieth century.
Climate change ranks well below other contributors, such as dikes and
levee construction, to increased flooding.”

NIPCC:
“There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global
warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend
on rural livelihoods for income are benefitting from rising
agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of
Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most
critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role
in the realization of such benefits.

IPCC: “Risk of severe harm for large urban populations due to inland flooding.”

NIPCC:
“No changes in precipitation patterns, snow, monsoons, or river flows
that might be considered harmful to human well-being or plants or
wildlife have been observed that could be attributed to rising CO2
levels. What changes have been observed tend to be beneficial.”

IPCC:
“Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient
access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural
productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal
capital in semi-arid regions.”

NIPCC: “Higher atmospheric CO2
concentrations benefit plant growth-promoting microorganisms that help
land plants overcome drought conditions, a potentially negative aspect
of future climate change. Continued atmospheric CO2 enrichment should
prove to be a huge benefit to plants by directly enhancing their growth
rates and water use efficiencies.”

IPCC: “Systemic risks due to extreme [weather] events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services.”

NIPCC:
“There is no support for the model-based projection that precipitation
in a warming world becomes more variable and intense. In fact, some
observational data suggest just the opposite, and provide support for
the proposition that precipitation responds more to cyclical variations
in solar activity.”

IPCC: “Risk of loss of marine ecosystems and
the services they provide for coastal livelihoods, especially for
fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic.”

NIPCC:
“Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a
significant threat to aquatic life. Many aquatic species have shown
considerable tolerance to temperatures and CO2 values predicted for the
next few centuries, and many have demonstrated a likelihood of positive
responses in empirical studies. Any projected adverse impacts of rising
temperatures or declining seawater and freshwater pH levels
(“acidification”) will be largely mitigated through phenotypic
adaptation or evolution during the many decades to centuries it is
expected to take for pH levels to fall.”

IPCC: “Risk of loss of terrestrial ecosystems and the services they provide for terrestrial livelihoods.”

NIPCC:
“Terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result
of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Empirical
data pertaining to numerous animal species, including amphibians, birds,
butterflies, other insects, reptiles, and mammals, indicate global
warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion
and proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations, or
otherwise have no observable impacts one way or the other. Multiple
lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some
cases evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”

IPCC:
“Risk of mortality, morbidity, and other harms during periods of
extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations.”

NIPCC:
“A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human
mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by
global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those
lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible
influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a
phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world.”

How
could two teams of scientists come to such obviously contradictory
conclusions on seemingly every point that matters in the debate over
global warming? There are many reasons why scientists disagree, the
subject, by the way, of an excellent book a couple years ago titled
Wrong by David H. Freedman. A big reason is IPCC is producing what
academics call “post-normal science” while NIPCC is producing
old-fashioned “real science.”

What is a non-scientist to make of
these dueling reports? Indeed, what is a scientist to make of this? Very
few scientists are familiar with biology, geology, physics,
oceanography, engineering, medicine, economics, and scores of other more
specialized disciplines that were the basis for the claims summarized
above.

It is frequently said of the global warming debate that it
comes down to who you believe rather than what you know. Many climate
scientists say they “believe in man-made global warming” even though
their own research contradicts key points in the arguments advanced in
support of that hypothesis. They say this because they believe the IPCC
is telling the truth about findings outside their areas of expertise.
Ditto influential science journals such as Nature and Science, which
claim to speak on behalf of “climate science.”

The NIPCC reports
were conceived and written to offer a way out of this conundrum. They
are written in a style that laymen without special training can
understand, provide explanations of how research was conducted and
summarizing the actual findings, often quoting at length from original
scholarly sources. Chapters often present research chronologically, in
the order in which the studies were published, so readers can understand
how the debate has changed over time.

The NIPCC reports are
hefty – the first volume in the Climate Change Reconsidered series was
850 pages long, and the latest volume is more than 1,000 pages – but
executive summaries and “key findings” at the beginning of each chapter
make them easy to navigate and fascinating to browse. They are all
available for free online at www.climatechangereconsidered.org.

How
credible are the NIPCC reports? Endorsements by prominent
scientists, reviews, and citations in peer-reviewed journals appear at
the Web site mentioned above. NIPCC reports are produced by scores of
scientists from around the world (some 20 countries so far), cite
thousands of peer-reviewed studies, and are themselves peer-reviewed. In
June 2013, a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a
Chinese translation and condensed edition of the 2009 and 2011 volumes.

We
know the authors of the IPCC’s reports have financial conflicts of
interest, since the government bureaucracies that select them and the UN
that oversees and edits the final reports stand to profit from public
alarm over the possibility that global warming will be harmful. The
authors of the NIPCC series have no such conflicts. The series is funded
by three private family foundations without any financial interest in
the outcome of the global warming debate. The publisher, The Heartland
Institute, neither solicits nor receives any government or corporation
funding for the Climate Change Reconsidered series. (It does receive
some corporate funding for its other research and educational programs.)

So
is man-made global warming a crisis? Don’t just wonder about it,
understand it yourself. Read one or a few chapters of one of the NIPCC
reports, and ask if what you read is logical, factual, and relevant to
the debate. See if the UN or its many apologists take into account the
science and evidence NIPCC summarizes, and then decide whether its
predictions of “of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods” is science
or fiction.

The
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
just issued the "Summary for Policymakers" for its new report, Climate
Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. The report aims to
sum up what is known about the likely impacts of future climate change,
including more droughts, higher sea levels, greater risk of species
extinction, and so forth. But what will these changes cost humanity in
terms of economic output? Here is the relevant section from the Summary:

Global economic impacts from climate change are difficult to estimate.

Economic
impact estimates completed over the past 20 years vary in their
coverage of subsets of economic sectors and depend on a large number of
assumptions, many of which are disputable, and many estimates do not
account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other
factors. With these recognized limitations, the incomplete estimates of
global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of
~2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income (emphasis added) (±1 standard
deviation around the mean)(medium evidence, medium agreement). Losses
are more likely than not to be greater, rather than smaller, than this
range (limited evidence, high agreement). Additionally, there are large
differences between and within countries. Losses accelerate with greater
warming (limited evidence, high agreement), but few quantitative
estimates have been completed for additional warming around 3°C or
above. Estimates of the incremental economic impact of emitting carbon
dioxide lie between a few dollars and several hundreds of dollars per
tonne of carbon (robust evidence, medium agreement). Estimates vary
strongly with the assumed damage function and discount rate.

Let's
assume that the increase in future global average temperature is below
2°C. Gross world product (GWP) in 2012 was about $72 trillion. That
divvied up between 7.2 billion people yields an average per capita
income of around $10,000. Now assume that world economy grows at 2.5
percent annually over the next 85 years and world population reaches 10
billion. GWP in 2100 would be about $590 trillion and per capita GDP
would $59,000. If climate change lowered income by 2 percent by 2100,
that would mean GWP would be $578 trillion and per capita GWP would be
$57,800. How much should people living now on $10,000 per year sacrifice
so that people making six times more in 2100 have an extra $1,200 in
income?

Now let's assume that the high climate change damage
estimate promulgated in the Stern Review: The Economics of Climate
Change (2006) reduces incomes in 2100 by as much as 20 percent below
what they would otherwise have been. Average income in 2100 would then
be just $47,500—still nearly five times more than current global per
capita income.

Over at The Telegraph, economist Andrew Lilico provides this interesting analysis:

The
new report will apparently tell us that the global GDP costs of an
expected global average temperature increase of 2.5 degrees
Celsius over the 21st century will be between 0.2 and 2 per cent. To
place that in context, the well-known Stern Review of 2006 estimated the
costs as 5-20 per cent of GDP. Stern estimates the costs of his
recommended policies for mitigating climate change at 2 per cent of GDP –
and his estimates are widely regarded as relatively optimistic (others
estimate mitigation costs as high as 10 per cent of global GDP).
Achieving material mitigation, at a cost of 2 per cent and more of
global GDP, would require international co-ordination that we have known
since the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change simply
was not going to happen. Even if it did happen, and were conducted
optimally, it would mitigate only a fraction of the total rise, and
might create its own risks.

And to add to all this, now we are
told that the cost might be as low as 0.2 per cent of GDP. At a 2.4 per
cent annual GDP growth rate, the global economy increases 0.2 per cent
every month.

So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept
enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of
global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the
benefits even on the Government's own evaluation criteria, with a global
cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost
will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and
then maybe – just maybe – we might save between one and ten months of
global GDP growth.

The IPCC Summary does additionally warn that
warming higher than 2°C might shove the climate system over tipping
points that would produce substantially more losses. The Summary asserts
that "low-probability outcomes with large consequences, is central to
understanding the benefits and tradeoffs of alternative risk management
actions." The chance of total catastrophe warrants some action be taken
to avoid it, but how much and at what cost?

Keith
Baugues is not a scientist, but that didn't stop him on a recent wintry
day from expressing skepticism about global warming — something that is
broadly accepted in the scientific community.

After weeks of
heavy snow and freezing air, he had had enough. He took to a governmnent
message board one day in February, complaining that his normal
45-minute commute had turned into a painful three-hour slog. "Anyone who
says global warming is obviously suffering from frostbite," he wrote.

Baugues
would later say he was only joking. But he wasn't just any government
bureaucrat. Baugues is assistant commissioner in the Office of Air
Quality in the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, the man
in charge of cleaning up Indiana's air.

In a state that
traditionally ranks near the top for pollution and coal production —
both of which are thought to contribute to global warming — his words
rubbed his own employees the wrong way.

Reaction was swift,
according to remarks posted to the message board reviewed by The
Indianapolis Star. Several IDEM staff members wrote that the comment
flew in the face of nearly unanimous scientific consensus and offended
and embarrassed them.

"Either support consensus science or please
keep your opinions to yourself. The rest of us are embarrassed by your
unwillingness to accept what is happening," one worker wrote.

Another
said that Baugues "should not speak on such matters until he is better
informed." Then that person, who was not named, took pains to point out
that recent extremes of cold weather were caused by warming global
temperatures. That resulted in more water being absorbed into the
atmosphere, pushing the arctic jet stream farther south.

"The
fact that [Baugues] disparages the exact kind of science that disproves
his statement only further illustrates how out of touch this
administration is with the current environmental crisis facing not only
Hoosiers, but the entire world," the person wrote.

Baugues
studied engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre
Haute and has spent six years at IDEM and nine years with the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.

He previously was a project
manager at Keramida, an engineering firm whose clients include power
plants, mines, foundries, factories and oil and gas facilities.

In
response to the outcry, Baugues wrote to his staff on March 19 trying
to tamp down the outcry. But he stuck by his position. "I am a skeptic
on global warming," he declared.

"It seems silly to be talking about global warming at a time when we were having extremely cold unseasonable weather," he wrote.

He
said if staff members thought they had "important facts about global
warming," he would be willing to discuss it during lunch hours.

Baugues
declined to talk to The Indianapolis Star. A spokesman said Thursday
that the initial comments were meant "to add levity and spur discussion
of global warming." He said that under Baugues the state has attained
compliance with federal mandates for air quality.

But some
scientists and environmentalists note that Baugues' comments are at such
odds with overwhelming scientific opinion that they wonder whether he
is the right person to lead Indiana's efforts to regulate air polluters.

Dick
Van Frank, a former member of the Indiana Air Pollution Control Board,
was momentarily speechless when he heard of Baugues' comments. "Is he
kidding? Is that a joke?"

Although January was unusually cold
across much of the United States, it was actually the fourth-warmest
January on record worldwide, said Lonnie G. Thompson, an Ohio State
University professor of earth sciences who has researched the climate
for more than 30 years.

"People tend to look out their back door
and think that is an indication of what's happening on the planet, which
of course it's not," Thompson said.

The Hoosier Environmental
Council called Baugues' remarks disturbing. "Simply because there's
really cold weather in one part of the world doesn't in any way
undermine the scientific concerns that climate change is real," said
Karen Ferarro, a lawyer with the organization.

Yet in Indiana,
which ranks in the top 10 among states for coal production, Baugues is
just the latest to express skepticism about global warming and climate
change.

In February, Gov. Mike Pence appeared on NBC's "Meet the
Press" and said he wasn't sure that climate change was caused by human
activities.

"We haven't seen a lot of warming lately," Pence
said. "I remember back in the '70s, we were talking about the emerging
ice age. We'll leave the scientific debate to the future."

In
their latest report on climate change, officials at the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once again fail to
address important developments in climate science that conflict with
their narrative of fear. (See: Threat from global warming heightened in
latest U.N. report)

Specifically, the IPCC press release ignores:
(1) the growing divergence between observed global temperatures and the
computer model projections on which scary climate impact assessments
depend, (2) 20 recent studies indicating that climate sensitivity (an
estimate of how much warming results from a given increase in
atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations) is about 40 percent less than
the mean estimate of IPCC models, and (3) studies indicating that the
three main climate doomsday scenarios — ocean circulation shutdown,
rapid ice sheet disintegration, runaway warming from melting frozen
methane deposits — are scientifically implausible (for references, see
pp. 23-26 of CEI’s comment letter on the social cost of carbon).

"It
May Take a Global Vegetarian Movement to Combat Climate Change." That's
the title of a National Journal article this week, but here's the real
kicker, penned in the very first paragraph: "If we really want to cut
down on global greenhouse emissions, we're going to have to do something
about cow farts." Yes, cow farts. "That's the conclusion of a study
published [Monday] in the journal Climatic Change," reports Brian
Resnick, who added that the researchers are proposing less meaty diets
and fewer livestock because it's the only "shot of reaching the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's global-warming mitigation
goals."

According to the analysis, meat consumption will need to
be reduced between 25% and 75% depending on the level of other fossil
fuel-cutting measures. That's ironic -- the solution for saving mankind
is now the regulation of ... nature? In other news: "Study: Vegetarians
Less Healthy, Lower Quality Of Life Than Meat-Eaters."

We'll curb the blight of the solar farm, say Tories: Britain vows to slow the spread of panels across countryside

The
spread of large solar farms should be controlled so they do not become
as unpopular as wind turbines, the Energy Minister said yesterday.

Greg Barker pledged that he would not allow solar power to ‘become the new onshore wind’.

He
said he wanted a shift away from huge solar farms that blight the
landscape, in favour of small panels on the roofs of homes, offices and
schools.

Mr Barker said Britain’s rooftops should become mini power stations, as he announced a new solar strategy.

The plans include turning Government offices, factories, supermarkets and car parks into ‘solar hubs’.

His
intervention comes after it emerged this week that the Prime Minister
is planning to make a stand against onshore wind turbines before the
next election.

A Conservative source said that Mr Cameron is ‘of
one mind’ with the loudest opponents of onshore windfarms and is
considering a cap on the number of new turbines.

Mr Barker said yesterday: ‘I do not want solar farms to become the new onshore wind.

‘Solar
power enjoys huge popularity, so we have to be careful. I do not want
to see unrestricted growth of solar farms in the British countryside.’

He
added: ‘We have put ourselves among the world leaders on solar and this
ambitious strategy will place us right at the cutting edge.

‘There
is massive potential to turn our large buildings into power stations
and we must seize the opportunity this offers to boost our economy as
part of our long-term economic plan.

‘Solar not only benefits the
environment, it will see British job creation and deliver the clean and
reliable energy supplies the country needs at the lowest possible cost
to consumers.’

There has been a huge expansion in the number of
large solar projects. Two years ago there were 46 large-scale farms in
Britain, but by the end of February this year there were 184 projects.
An additional 194 projects have planning permission and are awaiting
construction.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and
Climate Change said: ‘We want to move the emphasis for growth away from
large solar farms and instead focus on opening up the solar market for
the UK’s estimated 250,000 hectares [600,000 acres] of south-facing
commercial rooftops.’

The Solar Trade Association welcomed the
announcement, saying it would strengthen the UK’s position in the
‘booming’ global solar market.

Chief executive Paul Barwell said:
‘Greg Barker has championed solar power specifically because he knows
it has the greatest potential to empower millions of people across the
UK with low-cost green energy. Solar will also provide thousands of
good-quality local jobs.’

Tory plans to make a stand against
onshore wind have been opposed by Lib Dems, including Mr Barker’s boss,
Energy Secretary Ed Davey.

Mr Davey told Parliament on Thursday:
‘Onshore wind is ... the cheapest large-scale renewable technology, and I
would not want to do anything to reduce its deployment.’

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

4 April, 2014

The Noah film is afloat with Greenie extremism

AMAZING. Hollywood just killed God, and almost no critic noticed how it quietly slipped a green human-hater in his place.

I
never thought you could make a two-hour film about Noah and his ark
without mentioning “God” even once, but director Darren Aronofsky has
managed it in his $142 million epic, which opened last week.

His
Noah, played by a muttering Russell Crowe, prays to a different deity, a
much nastier one called “the creator” who seems to brood on global
warming.

Hey, what a coincidence! So does Aronofsky, who last
year declared, “climate change as an enemy of the people”. So does
Crowe, tweeting in most unbiblical language: “F--- denial of climate
change.”

And in their film, Noah, they give us their creator, a
vegetarian who really does want to “f--- denial of climate change” and
put filthy humans in their place so, as Crowe’s Noah rasps, “creation
will be left alone — safe. Beautiful”.

As an agnostic, I should barely care which invisible being Crowe talks to, but this switcheroo is freaky.

I’m
not pretending the God first described in the Old Testament 3500 years
ago and worshipped since by Jews and then Christians was a softie.

He
once got so fed up with man — those “corrupt” sinners “filled with
violence” and not following “his way upon the Earth” — that he vowed to
“bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh”.

But at least he still liked people enough to want some more after drowning the first lot.

So
God didn’t just tell Noah to build an ark big enough to carry breeding
pairs of every animal, but let him bring three wives for his three sons
so they could “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”.

They could even eat animals for strength: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.”

Humans first, nature second.

But
Aronofsky’s “creator” puts humans last. In Noah, we see a pre-flood
planet which humans in coarse furs, carrying spears and living in huts,
have improbably managed to utterly destroy with what we’re told is their
“great industrial civilisation”.

Some of these polluters kill
Noah’s saintly father for trying to stop them mining what he protests is
“the creator’s land”, but Noah keeps the family tradition alive. “Noah
was the first environmentalist,” Aronofsky has said.

Noah rebukes a son for plucking a flower and even kills men he finds hunting an animal.

So
killing animal, bad. Killing men, not so. This is a deity with
radically different priorities, and they don’t include man — not
according to Noah.

In fact, one of God’s most famous lines in the
Old Testament, telling us to “subdue” nature and “have dominion over
... every living thing”, is in Aronofsky’s film said by the chief
villain, who even munches on one of Noah’s animals as he declares nature
is “something you take dominion over, you subdue it”.

So what
the Jewish and Christian God gives — Earth’s riches — Aronofsky’s
“creator” takes away, telling Crowe-Noah he’ll send a flood to have “all
life blotted out because of what man has done” — not to each other or
him, but to nature. Meat-eaters must die.

As Crowe-Noah tells his
family: “We have been chosen to save the innocent. The animals.” When
the flood passes, there will be no men to “destroy the garden”.

Boy,
this Noah and his creator hate humans. Crowe’s Noah, unlike the
Bible’s, will take not one fertile female on the ark. His own wife is
past child-bearing, and the only other woman on board, his eldest son’s
wife, is thought barren. Noah even refuses to help his second son’s
healthy girlfriend join them.

No breeders wanted.

This
green hatred of humans is not in the Bible, but is in the gospels of the
green religion’s most radical preachers, such as Sea Shepherd’s Paul
Watson, who once called man “the AIDS of the earth”.

Take another
real-life Crowe-Noah, Earth First! spokesman Dave Forman, who argued:
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social
and environmental.”

Sarah Irving, from the Ethical Consumer
magazine, even set an example, having herself sterilised because it was
“the most environmentally friendly thing I could do in a warming world”.

What a poster child for Crowe-Noah’s ark of self-extincters!

Of
course, there is one problem with an ark without one healthy human
womb. Who, now, would be around to buy a ticket to Aronofsky’s movie?

Beer
brewers are objecting to a proposed federal rule that would make it
harder for breweries to sell leftover grains as animal feed instead of
throwing them away.

The Food and Drug Administration rule change
would mean brewers would have to meet the same standards as livestock
and pet-food manufacturers, imposing new sanitary handling procedures,
record keeping and other food safety processes on brewers.

Beer
makers complain that the new rules, if adopted, would force them to dump
millions of tons of "spent grains," which are left over after barley,
wheat and other grains are steeped in hot water.

Bear Republic
brewmaster Rich Norgrove says the rules would be costly and force
brewers to dump the grains, instead of the more sustainable practice of
feeding them to livestock.

The Northern California brewery sells
its spent grain to local ranches, which use it as an affordable food
source for about 300 head of cattle, according to The Santa Rosa Press
Democrat.

"Now the government wants to get involved," Cheryl
LaFranchi, a Knight's Valley rancher, said. "What are they going to do
with it? Put it in a landfill?"

The FDA says the rules stem from a new, broad modernization of the food safety system.

"This proposed regulation would help prevent foodborne illness in both animals and people," the agency said in the statement.

The FDA is collecting comment through Monday, and two of the beer industry's major trade groups have mobilized against the idea.

Chris
Thorne of the Beer Institute said he believes once the FDA has all of
the information, it will see the benefits of the current system of
recycling the old grain.

“This regulation is onerous and
expensive, but really it’s just unnecessary. There has never been a
single reported negative incidence with spent grain," Thorne said in a
statement.

The Colorado-based Brewers Association issued a statement last week calling proposal an "unwarranted burden for all brewers."

"Many
of the more than 2,700 small and independent craft breweries that
operate throughout the United States provide spent grain to local farms
for use as animal feed," the group said. "The proposed FDA rules on
animal feed could lead to significantly increased costs and disruption
in the handling of spent grain."

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., on
Monday urged the FDA to complete a risk assessment of the reuse of
brewers' spent grains. He warned the proposal could force brewers to
dispose of spent grains at landfills, forcing small breweries to incur
an average cost of nearly $43 million per year.

"Colorado's craft
brewers are leading the way forward for their industry, creating some
of the world's most innovative beers and sustainability practices,"
Udall said in a statement. "The FDA needs to ensure our food supply
remains safe, but its new proposed rule may unjustifiably hurt
Colorado's brewers and farmers."

Santa Rosa rancher Jim Cunningham gets about 10 tons of used grain from the Lagunitas Brewery every day at about $100 per ton.

With
drought and other factors pushing commercial feed prices more than
three times higher than the brewery grain, he says the new rules would
affect his bottom line.

"It might put us out of business if we couldn't get cheaper feed," Cunningham said.

A new inspector general's report covering the EPA is profoundly dismaying.

It
states that the EPA has conducted tests on humans -- in many cases
without fully disclosing all risks, even deathly ones -- in order to
justify more onerous air regulations.

In some cases, consent
forms for tests of pollutants (1) did not contain the information about
the upper range of the pollutant exposure to which humans would be
subjected; (2) nor did it offer information about the known increased of
death even from short-term exposure for those already suffering from
cardiovascular disease (p.21). Another group of studies failed to
include language about the long-term cancer risk resulting from exposure
to diesel exhaust, the substance being examined.

Perhaps this
was simple negligence. But it raises an ugly specter: That someone at
the EPA was so eager to get results that would justify more stringent
air regulations that officials simply failed to warn subjects adequately
-- including those most prone to the dramatic, adverse health
consequences that could be used to advance the administration's agenda.
After all, to make an environmentally-friendly omelet, perhaps you just
have to break a few human eggs, right?

The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the
summary of its fifth report. Unsurprisingly, it still blames humans as
the main driver of global warming — or, climate change, climate
disruption, extreme weather; whichever term you prefer. It’s
unsurprising that the IPCC, an organization founded to find a way to
limit human influence on climate, would sound such an alarm. After all,
if it was discovered that nature is the main driver of the changes in
climate, the IPCC would be out of a job.

Of course, that won’t
happen. After all, the science surrounding global warming is settled and
there is a vast consensus. Since we are running out of time, we
therefore need to act promptly, right?

Wrong. First of all,
science can never be settled for it to be called so. It took 250 years
until Einstein found faults in Newton’s theory of gravity. It took more
than 150 years to find how humans evolved from apes through a DNA
discovery. Even today, scientists can’t decide what caused the Black
Death in Europe.

The same goes for the climate hysteria.
Scientists can’t decide if it will cause more snow or less snow, record
snowfalls or their total absence, if biodiversity will increase or
decrease, if there will be fewer tornadoes or more, or even when the
world will end if we don’t act.

In addition, human influence on
climate is unlikely considering that several peer-reviewed temperature
reconstructions from Turkey, Poland, Eastern Australia, Northern
Scandinavia, the Central Mediterranean Sea, Tibet, the Pearl River Basin
in China, Bolivia, Arctic and Eastern Siberia, Southern England, the
Equatorial Pacific Ocean, Peru, Chile, Iceland, Antarctica, the Central
Eastern Alps, British Columbia, Quebec, and the Southwestern US all
confirm the IPCC findings from 1990 that the Medieval Warm Period
between 1000 and 1350 AD was much warmer than today. In other words,
Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which supposedly shows a dramatic increase
in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, is probably false.

Also,
hurricanes have not increased in strength or number in the past 40
years. A closer look at data shows the same neutral trend since 1851; it
may even go back 228 years. Furthermore, no hurricane of category three
or above has made landfall in the U.S. since Wilma (October 24, 2005) —
the longest stretch since 1900. The same thing goes for tornadoes since
the 1950s; F3+ tornadoes are actually decreasing. Similarly, droughts
are not on the rise in the U.S., despite exponential increase in CO2.
California’s recent drought, for example, is not uncommon.

Polar
bears are nowhere near extinction, as assessed by the Nunavut government
and Inuit hunters in Northern Canada. Speaking of debunked myths,
dozens of papers show that the sun drives climate, not CO2, and that
petrochemical influence on climate has been blown out of proportion.
Finally, the Arctic, while it may be melting more during summer time,
refreezes so quickly that its May 1st extent hasn’t changed much since
1979. Also, the Antarctic ice has been expending since that same year.

Despite
overwhelming evidence that the science is not settled, climate change
fanatics keep hammering about that supposed 97 percent consensus among
scientists. In reality, the supposed consensus is likely overblown. It’s
either based on 2008 survey of only 79 climatologists or is actually
closer to 0.3 percent when one analyzes a sample of scientific papers.

Climate
fanatics’ insistence on a consensus to silence debate has some eerie
traits of fascism. Indeed, only in fascist societies can authorities
make sure dissenters are silenced by whatever way they see fit. And this
is exactly what climate fanatics want; they systematically refuse to
debate climate sceptics by snobbishly claiming they are not worthy of
recognition. People like David Suzuki, Canada’s green pope, call for
Inquisition-like censorship of skeptics. Professors like Lawrence
Torcello want skeptics jailed for “criminal negligence.” Finally, Al
Gore has no problem resorting to ad hominem attacks by calling skeptics
“deniers” and by linking them to homophobes, racists, alcoholics,
baby-eaters, etc.

Reasonable citizens should not lose any sleep
over the IPCC’s latest report or scaremongering from climate fanatics.
Their catastrophic predictions are simply a continuation of doomsday
predictions Malthus started in the 19th century. And like Malthus, they
have been utterly wrong, be it about agriculture, violence or the rising
sea level. Climate hysteria is crumbling little by little, and like any
fake science, it will collapse sooner or later.

Finally,
someone has come up with a way to settle the debate over climate
change: Put the people on the wrong side of the argument in cages.

A
writer for the website Gawker recently penned a self-described "rant"
on the pressing need to arrest, charge and imprison people who "deny"
global warming. In fairness, Adam Weinstein doesn't want mass arrests.
(Besides, in a country where only 44 percent of Americans say there is
"solid evidence" of global warming and it's mostly due to human
activity, you can't round up every dissenter.) Fact-checking scientists
are spared. So is "the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is
right. ... You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid
to do anything other than choke the earth's atmosphere a little more
with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150's gassy exhaust."

But
Weinstein's magnanimity ends there. Someone must pay. Weinstein suggests
the government simply try the troublemakers and spokespeople. You know,
the usual suspects. People like Limbaugh himself as well as ringleaders
of political organizations and businesses that refuse to toe the line.
"Those malcontents must be punished and stopped."

Weinstein says
that this "is an argument that's just being discussed seriously in some
circles." He credits Rochester Institute of Technology philosophy
professor Lawrence Torcello for getting the ball rolling. Last month,
Torcello argued that America should follow Italy's lead. In 2009, six
seismologists were convicted of poorly communicating the risks of a
major earthquake. When one struck, the scientists were sentenced to six
years in jail for downplaying the risks. Torcello and Weinstein want a
similar approach for climate change.

This is a great standard for
free speech in America. Let's just agree that the First Amendment
reads, "Nothing in this clause shall be considered binding if it
contradicts legal practices in the Abruzzo region of Italy."

The
truth is this isn't as new an outlook as Weinstein suggests. For
instance, in 2009, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that
"deniers" in Congress who opposed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill
were committing "treason" while explaining their opposition on the House
floor. (That same year, Krugman's fellow Timesman Thomas Friedman wrote
that China's authoritarian system was preferable to ours, in part,
because it lets "enlightened" leaders deal with climate change.)

"The
fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists
expected," Krugman insisted. How fast the earth is changing is open to
all kinds of debate, but short of an asteroid strike it won't change as
fast as the global warming pessimists have claimed. For example, in
2008, Al Gore predicted that the North Pole ice cap would be ice-free by
2013. Arctic ice, which never came close to disappearing, has actually
been making a bit of comeback lately.

Gore's prediction -- echoed
by then-Sen. John Kerry and countless others -- was always ridiculous
hyperbole. But even most serious, non-hyperbolic, computer-modeled
predictions have overestimated the amount of warming we've experienced.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has had to
retract several histrionic predictions, such as its erroneous prophecy
that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Its new
report, out on Monday, contains a new raft of dire prophecies requiring
trillions in new spending. If I greet it with skepticism, shall I pack a
toothbrush for my trip to jail?

Climate-change activists insist
that in science, revisions are routine, and that such corrections prove
the good faith of scientists. Even if that's true, one might still note
that incentives are unhealthily arranged so that even well-intentioned
researchers are encouraged to exaggerate the dangers of climate change
and discouraged to criticize hyperbole. Moreover, were it not for the
skeptics and deniers, many such corrections would never have been
brought to light. (My own view is that man plays some role in warming,
but the threat is overblown and the popular remedies range from trivial
to unaffordable to ridiculous.)

The real problem is that
political activists and many leading institutions, particularly in the
news media and academia, are determined to demonize any kind of
skepticism -- about the extent of the threat or the efficacy of proposed
solutions -- as illegitimate idiocy.

That attitude is
unscientific and undemocratic enough. But it sure beats calling for your
opponents to be thrown in the gulag for disagreeing with you.

British wind farms were paid £8.7million to switch OFF their turbines last month because they generated too much electricity

Every day we're urged to be more and more energy conscious.

But
it has been revealed that wind farms were paid £8.7 million to switch
off last month because there wasn't enough demand for the energy they
generated.

And the National Grid has been making the 'constraint
payments' for years, with £32 million paid in the last year to keep the
turbines powered down.

According to the Renewable Energy
Foundation (REF), the 'largest monthly amount paid for wind farms not to
generate (£8.7 million)' was in March of this year.

The turbines
were shut down because, during periods of increased electricity
generation and low-peak usage, there is not enough demand for energy.

There
is currently no adequate method to store the large amounts of energy
they produce when it's not being used, so the turbines must be turned
off.

The 'constraint payments' are made to operators of various wind farms to stop them generating the surplus electricity.

'Wind
farm constraints are essentially caused by difficulties in exporting
excess wind electricity generated in Scotland,' the REF states on their
website.

'In March 2014 approximately 12 per cent of the
potential wind power output of large Scottish grid connected wind farms
had to be constrained off the system, thus incurring costs to the
consumer in the form of constraint payments.'

But the REF
suggests that the wind industry is 'attempting to conceal the scale of
this market abuse, by claiming that wind power receives less in
constraint payments than conventional generation.

'This is
untrue, and fails to convey the significant distinction between payments
to conventional generators to start generating, and additional payments
to wind power to stop generating.'

According to the National Grid, however, these payments are required to cope with periods of increased demand.

'Constraint payments are made when there is congestion on the network,' a spokesperson for the National Grid tells MailOnline.

'It's a bit like with motorways, you get jams but you wouldn't necessarily build new motorways to eliminate the jams.

'So
using wind constraint payments we're expecting that to work out as more
cost-effective than building lots of new pylons and wires.

'Our job is to manage the electricity system minute by minute.

'We choose whatever generation is the cheapest to constrain at a given time to keep costs as low as possible.

'Constraint
payments can be made for any number of reasons, including high winds or
parts of the grid being out for maintenance or improvement work.'

The amount of constraint payments has increased considerably since March 2013 when they amounted to just £10,000.

The
National Grid says this due to a number of factors including windier
weather over the past year and more wind turbines coming online.

But they hope to reduce constraint payments by increasing the capabilities of the network in the next two years.

By
2016 they plan to complete the £1 billion Western Link project 'that
will have more than double the capacity from Scotland to England from
2.2GW in 2010 to 5.8GW in 2016.'

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

3 April, 2014

How the Global Warming Scare Began

With John Coleman

Climate Anxious Children - can parents, and caring teachers, help correct the harm done by climate alarm materials??

"Collectively,
anxiety conditions are the most common mental disorders in children.
Moreover, they often persist throughout life, causing significant
distress and interfering significantly with social life and achievement
both during the child’s formative years and later in adulthood."

The quote is from a mental health researcher, Kathy Griffiths

There
is considerable evidence that many children suffer from anxiety about
climate change. The plausibility of that seems obvious given the
dreadful materials, in books , websites, and curricula aimed at
children, and in some cases aimed at scaring them into being political
activists.

Who will help children cope with climate alarmism, and
help protect them from those who, wittingly or otherwise, are acting as
recruiting sergeants?

The best candidates are surely their parents, aided whenever possible by sympathetic teachers.

The pioneering book Facts, Not Fear
by Sanera and Shaw, shows how easy it is to de-fuse so many eco-alarms,
not just the climate one. Their approach is simply one of helping
children see the bigger picture, and not the narrow-minded,
highly-selective view pushed at them by propagandists.

I stumbled across an illustration of this today, on the blog of a teacher in London. His post is entitled

How Not to Teach Climate Change. Here is an extract from it:

'Last
week I substitute-taught a Year 5 class that was learning about climate
change. One of our pre-planned activities was to continue making
posters about “good gases and bad gases”. I immediately noted that every
student had slapped carbon dioxide (CO2) in the “bad gas” column.

I quizzed the class, and discovered that they had been taught the following line of thinking.

*
Carbon dioxide is by far the most important (organic compound) for the
sustainability of the biosphere (the whole of life on Earth).

*
Without CO2 the life of photosynthetic organisms and animals would be
impossible, given that CO2 provides the basis for the synthesis of
organic compounds that provide nutrients for plants and animals.

Just
think about that for a second. Imagine you’re a naive child, and
your teacher tells you that your every daily action creates poisonous
gases that destroy the planet.

I was shocked, and quickly set the
record straight by informing them that CO2 is actually essential for
life on earth; it feeds plants, and it is a crucial ingredient in their,
and in every other living creature’s, bodies. I added that scientists
think it may be warming up our planet, but they’re still not 100% sure.*

These facts came much to their surprise and relief. '

[It was from his post that I obtained the link to the mental healthcare quote which I used earlier]

See
how easy it was! Here is a man who has compassion for the
children, and enough knowledge to realise very quickly what a
dangerously limited view they have of CO2. A few simple facts seem
to have helped dispel at least some of their fear. Well done that
man!

This is one of the kinds of intervention suggested
by Sanera and Shaw, and it seems to me that it could be accomplished by
parents as well. But first, those parents need to get themselves
reasonably well-informed. They will need to look beyond
biased-outlets such as the BBC or most of the rest of the mass media,
such as the UK's Guardian or Independent newspapers.

A
discussion-group that met regularly could invite expert speakers, and do
online research to gather scientific results and informed opinions on
any issue.

Has your child been told that a polar bear will
die unless you switch off your lights and stop using the car so
often? It won't take long to discover that the bears are doing
quite well, and that nothing extraordinary has been happening to Arctic
sea ice, which has long been known to be highly variable.

Or
that rising seas will swamp their coastal cities? A quick check
should show that there has been no great acceleration of the slow rise
in sea levels which has been going on long before our CO2 could have had
an impact, and that the plausible projected levels this century will
readily be coped with.

It is not hard, but some persistence is required to sift through the torrents of alarmist-conformism that will be encountered.

Suppose
you believe, as many people do, that climate change due to
anthropogenic CO2 is a serious problem. There are two different ways you
might try to deal with it. One is by trying to keep it from happening,
or at least to slow it. The other is by adapting to it. There are at
least two respects in which the latter approach is superior to the
former.

The first is that it avoids the public good problem. If
the U.S. switches to more expensive sources of power in order to hold
down CO2 output, any benefit from reduced warming is shared with
the rest of the world. It is unlikely to happen unless either the
benefit is so much larger than the cost that it is worth doing for the
U.S. share alone or many countries manage to coordinate their policies,
despite the obvious temptation for each to free ride on the efforts of
the others. Neither is impossible, both are difficult.

Adaptation
does not face that problem. If Bangladesh deals with sea level rise by
diking its coast, the benefit goes to Bangladesh, not to the U.S. or
China. If a farmer deals with an increase in temperature by shifting to a
crop better suited to the new conditions, he gets the benefit.

The
second advantage of adaptation is that it affects only the negative
consequences of climate change. While the public discussion often
obscures the fact, there are positive consequences as well—indeed, it is
not clear that the net effect is negative, especially at low levels of
warming. Milder winters are, on the whole, a good thing. So are longer
growing seasons. So is an expansion of the habitable area of the
northern hemisphere, due to temperature contours shifting north. A
reduction in warming eliminates the good consequences as well as the
bad. Adaptation can target only the bad consequences.

Neither of
these proves that adaptation is superior—that depends on the costs of
adaptation, the costs imposed by warming, the benefits imposed by
warming, the costs of reducing warming. But both are arguments in favor
of adaptation.

Ministers
who question the majority view among scientists about climate change
should “shut up” and instead repeat the Government line on the issue,
according to MPs.

The BBC should also give less airtime to
climate sceptics and its editors should seek special clearance to
interview them, according to the Commons Science and Technology
Committee. Andrew Miller, the committee’s Labour chairman, said that
appearances on radio and television by climate sceptics such as Lord
Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, should be
accompanied by “health warnings”.

Mr Miller likened climate
sceptics to the Monster Raving Loony Party and said that the BBC should
limit interviews with them just as it restricted the coverage it gave to
fringe political parties.

In a report published today, the
committee criticises the BBC’s coverage of climate change, saying that
its news programmes “continue to make mistakes in their coverage of
climate science by giving opinions and scientific fact the same weight”.

The
MPs say that the BBC should apply the same “stringent requirements” to
interviewing climate sceptics as it applies to interviewing politicians.
“For example, any proposal to invite politicians to contribute to
non-political output must be referred to the Chief Adviser Politics. The
BBC could benefit from applying a similarly stringent approach when
interviewing non- experts on controversial scientific topics such as
climate change,” the committee says.

Speaking to The Times, Mr
Miller added that when Lord Lawson appeared, the BBC should make clear
that his think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, questioned
the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “At
the very least, put a caption at the bottom of the screen: ‘the Global
Warming Policy Foundation’s views are not accepted by 97 per cent of
scientists’,” he said.

The committee’s report says that the
Government is “failing to clearly and effectively communicate climate
science to the public”. It concludes: “All Ministers should acquaint
themselves with the science of climate change and then they, and their
Departments, should reflect the Government approach in person, in media
interviews and online by a presenting a clear and consistent message.”

Mr
Miller named Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, as one of the
ministers he believed had deviated from the Government line on climate
change. Mr Paterson reportedly told a fringe meeting at the Conservative
Party conference last year: “People get very emotional about this
subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been
changing for centuries.”

Mr Miller said: “There are dissenting
voices inside the Government machine . . . Frankly, the role of a
minister is either to accept collective responsibility or shut up or
leave. Climate change is such a hugely important public policy issue and
therefore to have inconsistency from within Government is extremely
dangerous territory.”

He said it was not acceptable to have
“ministers who are not prepared to line up beside No 10 and say ‘yes, I
accept climate change is real, we must do something about it’ .” He
added: “Paterson is one example — he is ducking and diving on this.”

The
committee also criticises the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraphfor
placing “heavy reliance . . . on the ability of their readers to
distinguish between fact and opinion on climate science”.

Responding
to Mr Miller’s comments, Lord Lawson said: “I think it is appalling
that a member of the House of Commons should want to shut down debate on
this issue.”

A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC does its utmost to
report on this complex subject as clearly as possible using our
specialist journalists. While the vast bulk of our interviews are with
climate scientists, as part of our commitment to impartiality it is
important that dissenting voices are also heard.”

Buried in UN Report: $100 Billion More Needed to Adapt to ‘Global Warming’

The
United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)
latest report estimates it will cost developed nations an additional
$100 billion each year to help poorer countries adapt to the devastating
effects of “unequivocal” global warming, including food shortages,
infrastructure breakdown, and civil violence.

But that figure was
deleted from the report’s executive summary after industrialized
nations, including the United States, objected to the high price tag.
(See IPCC Summary.pdf)

“The $100 billion figure, though included
in the 2,500-page main report, was removed from a 48-page executive
summary to be read by the world’s top political leaders,” the New York
Times reported. “It was among the most significant changes made as the
summary underwent final review during a dayslong editing session in
Yokohama [Japan]” where it was released Monday.

The final figure
is likely to be much higher, according to Chapter 17 (“Economics of
Adaptation”) of the full IPCC report, entitled Climate Change 2014:
Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, which notes that “there is
strong evidence of important omissions and shortcomings in data and
methods rendering these estimates highly preliminary.”

The report
goes on to say that the cost of adapting to global warming will most
likely be far greater than the $1 billion a day spent to prevent it in
2012 by government and private entities worldwide.

“Comparison of
the global cost estimates with the current level of adaptation funding
shows the projected global needs to be orders of magnitude greater than
the current investment levels, particularly in developing countries,”
the IPCC report stated.

Noting that there are “biophysical limits
to adaptation” to climate change, including “the inability to restore
outdoor comfort under high temperatures,” the report adds that “the
desirability of adaptation options will vary with time and climate
change realization.”

But the adverse affects of global warming will be felt by everyone, the UN panel claims.

“Nobody
on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate
change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said at a press conference
Monday in Yokohama, where the panel’s latest report was released.
“Without reductions in emissions,” he warned, the impacts of global
warming “could get out of control.”

“With high levels of warming
that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks
will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments
in adaptation will face limits,” said Chris Field, co-chair of the
panel’s Working Group II, which predicted that “by 2100 for the
high-emission scenario, the combination of high temperature and humidity
in some areas for parts of the year is projected to compromise normal
human activities, including growing food or working outdoors.”

Global
warming will also “indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in
the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying
well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic
shocks,” the report maintains.

However, the IPCC’s ability to
correctly predict future climactic conditions based on computer modeling
is coming under increasing fire by scientists because of its inability
to do so in the past.

For example, the panel’s widely-cited 2007
report, which was edited by Pachauri, predicted that Himalayan glaciers
were in danger of disappearing by 2035 due to global warming. Pachauri's
panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore that year, but he was
forced to walk back the prediction in 2010, referring to the blunder as a
“human error.”

And despite the panel’s insistence that the Earth
is getting hotter, five different datasets show that there’s been no
observable warming for 17 ½ years even as carbon dioxide levels have
risen 12 percent, notes Christopher Monckton, who says “the discrepancy
between prediction and observation continues to grow.”

On Monday,
the same day the IPCC report was released, the Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), whose membership includes
31,000 American scientists, released a paper that sharply contradicted
the IPCC report and pointed out that a warmer Earth would actually be a
good thing.

The report concluded:

“Atmospheric carbon
dioxide is not a pollutant; The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2
content is causing a great greening of the Earth;

There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels;

Terrestrial
ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming
temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2;

Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels do not pose a significant threat to aquatic life; and

A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events.”

On
Feb. 25th, former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore also testified
before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Subcommittee on
Oversight, telling members of Congress that contrary to the IPCC’s
findings,“it is ‘extremely likely’ that a warmer temperature than
today’s would be far better than a cooler one.”

“Today, we live
in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is
no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but
beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.” Moore
testified.

On the contrary, he added, “there is ample
reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring
disastrous results for human civilization."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

2 April, 2014

Leftist projection again

Hydrologist
Fiona Johnson, the dear lady below, is upset that debate about climate
change is uncivil. So who is it who calls skeptics "deniers" (as
in "holocaust deniers") and wants to lock them up? FiFi had better start talking to her own colleagues.

And
she seems to be shocked that "some people seem to believe that
scientists can't be trusted." Would that belief spring from
"Mike's nature trick" or "hiding the decline"? Would it spring
from the chronic refusal by Warmists to make their raw data
available?

And her argumentation about the evidence for
global warming is brainless. She says: "For climate change, the
evidence is clear that carbon dioxide and temperatures are
increasing". But that is not the question. The question is
whether CO2 is CAUSING significant warming. It's called the
"climate sensitivity" question, dear lady. FiFi is either a
fluffhead or a crook

......................

Science
is an exciting field to work in. There is a whole universe of problems
out there waiting for someone to solve. But science doesn't exist in a
vacuum.

For me, the most interesting part of being an engineer is
using my research to help individuals, and society in general, make
better decisions..

I would imagine the motivation is similar for
the hundreds of scientists who spent months compiling the latest IPCC
report released on Monday, and the thousands more who've spent their
careers trying to understand the mechanisms of global warming, its
timeframe and impacts.

The report has been well received by many,
but for some people the report seems to be seen as a personal affront,
written by a bunch of scientists solely for the purpose of destroying
the world that they live in.

The reality is that the IPCC report
is a document of careful language and moderated statements, approved by
the governments of 195 countries.

When scientists work together
to report results, our language is carefully calibrated, with the
caveats and limitations of our work thought out and often explicitly
discussed.

Science is a dialogue and our work is incremental – there is rarely a breakthrough paper.

We
work together in teams and discuss, argue, revise and gradually make
progress. This is a lifetime of work; a marathon, not a sprint.

There
are many subtleties in any profession and we can't expect people
outside of our individual fields to understand these. I don't expect to
understand the legal arguments in a court of law or commercial deals.
And it is unreasonable to expect that the measurement methods or the
scientific process that I take for granted in my work are any more
transparent to a lawyer.

At some point, though, unless we have
unlimited time to become experts ourselves, we need to trust that the
professionals in any field are good at what they do. That's what it
means to be professional. But some people seem to believe that
scientists can't be trusted.

Some level of scepticism is a good
thing – no one should take all information at face value. But thinking
that all scientists and engineers are wrong until proven otherwise does
not give any credit for the amount of work that goes into my research,
the IPCC reports and the work of all other scientists.

Interacting
with the media brings another level of complication to the relationship
between science and the community. Scientists are used to promoting
their research at conferences, to peers and to funding authorities. But
our incremental discoveries or improvements may not make for an
interesting story for the daily media. Reporting timeframes,
particularly in the digital age, are much quicker than the timelines
that research operates on.

Information is more available than
ever, but is the digital age improving the quality of the conversations?
The anonymity of email and comments on websites and blogs means that
people end up in a virtual shouting match where rarely anyone is
listening properly.

I find it frustrating that the comments in
social media and on forums degenerate in a fairly predictable way when
it comes to so-called debates about human-induced climate change.

But
we are having the wrong debate. For climate change, the evidence is
clear that carbon dioxide and temperatures are increasing. Where is the
interest in debating observations?

What is more interesting is
when we have to make decisions that depend on the values that we hold as
a community. Someone may value free markets, someone else may value the
natural diversity of our coral reefs, whilst a third may value a large
house on the beach. The debate that we need to have is how these values
can co-exist or if they can't then how to prioritise them. But the
current level of vitriol doesn't promote rational discussions.

Consumers
considering installing solar panels on their rooftops have far more to
think through than the initial decision to “go solar.”

They may
search for the best price, only to discover, as customers in central
Florida did, that after paying $20,000-40,000 for their systems, they
are stuck with installations that may be unusable or unsafe. BlueChip
Energy — which also operated as Advanced Solar Photonics (ASP) and
SunHouse Solar — sold its systems at environmental festivals and home
shows. Buyers thought they were getting a good deal and doing the right
thing for the environment. Instead, they were duped.

A year ago,
it was revealed that BlueChip Energy’s solar panels had counterfeit UL
labels — this means that the panels may not comply with standard safety
requirements established by the independent global certification company
Underwriters Laboratory. The Orlando Sentinel reports: “UL testing
assures that a product won’t catch fire, will conduct electricity
properly and can withstand weather. Without such testing, no one is
certain if the solar panels may fail.” Additionally, it states: “Without
the safety testing, they shouldn’t be connected to the electric grid” —
which leaves customers nervous about possible risks such as
overheating. Other reports claim that BlueChip inflated the efficiency
rates of its photovoltaic panels, which do not meet “65 percent of the
company’s published performance ratings.”

In July 2013,
BlueChip’s assets were sold off at pennies on the dollar and customers
were left with rooftop solar packages that now have no warranty.

With the shakeout in the solar photovoltaic industry, bankruptcy is a key concern for buyers. No company equals no warranty.

Two
of China’s biggest panel makers have failed. On March 20, 2013,
Suntech, one of the world’s biggest solar panel manufacturers, filed
bankruptcy. Earlier this month Shanghai Chaori Solar became China’s
first domestic corporate bond default. The Wall Street Journal reports
that another, Baoding Tainwei, has reported a second year of losses and
investors are waiting to “see if officials will let it fail.”

Regarding
Suntech’s bankruptcy, an industry report says the following about the
warranties: “While Suntech has said that it was committed to maintaining
the warranty obligations on its products following the bankruptcy, we
are unsure if customers will be willing to take a risk considering the
firm’s faltering financials.”

Last month, it was reported that
solar panels can be “dangerous in an emergency.” Firefighters have been
forced to stop fighting a fire due to electrocution concerns. The report
quotes Northampton, MA, Fire Chief Brian Duggan as saying electrocution
is not their only concern: “cutting through the roof for ventilation
would also take a lot longer.” Springfield fire commissioner Joe Conant
says: “nothing will stop them if there’s a life to be saved, but if it’s
simply to save the structure, solar panels may keep them from going on
the roof.

A Fox News story on the risk solar panels pose to
fire-fighters states: “Two recent fires involving structures decked with
solar panels have triggered complaints from fire chiefs and calls for
new codes and regulations that reflect the dangers posed by the
clean-energy devices. A two-alarm fire last week at a home in Piedmont,
Calif., prompted Piedmont Fire Chief Warren McLaren to say the
technology ‘absolutely’ made it harder on firefighters. Weeks earlier,
in Delanco, NJ, more than 7,000 solar panels on the roof of a massive
300,000-square foot warehouse factored into Delanco Fire Chief Ron
Holt’s refusal to send his firefighters onto the roof of a Dietz &
Watson facility.”

In part, due to the increased fire concerns,
roof-top solar panels can increase the cost of homeowners insurance. A
potential solar customer told me: “If you are thinking solar panels on
the roof, check your home insurance. Ours would have added a costly
rider to cover them and roof. That was another strike in our decision.”

Then,
of course, there are new concerns about scam artists like the one in
North Carolina who collected “money from victims under false pretense
that he would buy and install solar panels in their residences.”

As if all of that wasn’t enough, a new potentially fraudulent scheme has just been exposed.

A
recent report from the Arizona Republic, points to complaints the
Arizona Corporation Commission — the state’s top utility regulator — is
getting from Tucson customers of SolarCity Corporation. They claim: “the
solar leasing company is misleading them regarding the state rules for
hooking up a solar array.”

In essence, customers in Tucson are
being told one thing by their utility, Tucson Electric Power (TEP), but
something else by a private solar power company, SolarCity — the
nation’s second largest solar electrical contractor. This has drawn the
ire of Bob Stump, Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC).
“This is an issue of consumer protection and solar installer
transparency,” Stump told the Arizona Republic.

Stump made his
concerns clear in a March 12 letter to Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s Chief
Executive Officer: “I am concerned that you — as well as other solar
providers — may be communicating with customers in a way that is both
confusing and misleading and which deprives them of the balanced
information they need in order to make informed decisions.”

The
letter states: “Some customers … say that solar providers have told them
that the rates, rules and regulations applicable to net metering are
‘grandfathered,’ thereby implying that the rates associated with net
metering are not subject to change.” As a result, Stump says: “Customers
are then surprised, disappointed, and angry to learn from TEP that this
may not be the case.”

As a vocal advocate for responsible energy
— which I define as energy that is efficient, effective and economical —
I have closely followed what is happening with Arizona’s solar
industry. There, when the ACC proposed a modification to the
net-metering policies to make them more equitable to all utility
customers, the solar industry mounted an aggressive PR campaign in
attempt to block any changes. When the decision was made in November to
add a monthly fee onto the utility bills of new solar customers to make
them pay for using the power grid, I applauded the effort.

In
light of this new issue, with a leading solar company misleading
customers, it is time for the nation’s regulators to take a hard look at
their states’ policies. Remember, this past summer, Georgia regulators
voted for solar leasing such as SolarCity offers.

Pat Lyons, one
of New Mexico’s Public Regulatory Commissioners, watched what happened
in Arizona’s net metering battle. Upon learning about SolarCity’s
potential deception, he was alarmed. “As solar leasing, like SolarCity
pushes, moves into additional markets, regulators across the country
need to be aware of the potential pitfalls and misrepresentations.”

It
is vital that solar providers be held to the same high standard to
which we hold our electric utilities and are made to answer tough
questions about consumer protection, safety, and operation issues.
Stump’s letter to SolarCity’s CEO asked for responses to his questions
by March 31 and said he will “be placing this matter on a Commission
open meeting agenda in the near future in order to discuss these
important concerns with my fellow commissioners.”

It may be too
late to protect some solar customers in Tucson, but there is still a
chance to make sure others are treated fairly. If things don’t change,
the dark clouds hovering over the industry will be raining on
unsuspecting customers.

Hey!
All you progressive Democrats out there? Whatever you've been doing to
prevent global warming? Cut it out! Now! Hear me? It's spring for cripe
sakes. It's supposed to be warming up - even around here in the Maine
mountains - and it's not. There's more than two feet of snow on the
ground out there and more coming! And it doesn't melt right away like
it's supposed to this time of year either. All the skiers and
snowmobilers are ready too, but it just keeps building up. People are
getting tired of this, and I'm blaming you.

I've been looking
back at the last five years since you took over down and I'm starting to
catch on. You started off raising and spending all that "stimulus"
money - a trillion dollars almost - and I can't see any economic
stimulus going on at all! Where is it? Joe Biden kept telling us four
years ago us that "Recovery Summer" was on its way. Well it never came!
We're all still waiting out here. Now we're thinking summer itself isn't
coming this year either, much any less economic recovery! Spring hasn't
shown up and we're thinking summer won't either.

You said there
were thousands of shovel ready jobs out there, and you were going to use
that trillion dollars to build infrastructure like they did back in the
Great Depression. Well where is it? You guys said Herbert Hoover was an
idiot and you blamed him for the Great Depression, but at least he
built the Hoover Dam! It's still there - still generating electricity -
and it only took five years to finish. It's been that long since you
raised and spent that trillion dollars, so what have you got to show for
it? Nothing! Where did all the money go? We could have built lots of
Hoover Dams.

And how about the Golden Gate Bridge? That was built
with stimulus money during the Great Depression and it's still there
too. It cost $35 million, and that would be over $500 million in today's
money. We could have built over fifteen hundred Golden Gate Bridges
with the money you guys spent on this "stimulus," but we don't see any
bridges. We don't see anything!

You promised lots of green jobs
too. Where are they? You spent billions on solar energy development, and
windmill development, and battery development. How many of the
companies you invested in are bankrupt? How come the cost of electricity
keeps going up? Where did all that money go?

Like I said, I've
been thinking about all this and my theory is that you didn't spend the
money on economic stimulus at all. You didn't spend it on renewable
energy either because those companies are gone - poof! It's looking to
me like all that was a big smokescreen. I'm thinking you spent it all on
some secret project to prevent global warming that you're not telling
us about, and it's all gotten out of control! That's why it's so
friggin' cold!

You really wanted to do it with your "Cap and
Trade" bill, but it couldn't pass the Senate. You wanted to take over
the energy industry like you took over the health care industry with
Obamacare. So, what did you do instead? You took the trillion dollars
for stimulus and you spent it all on a secret Anti-Global-Warming
Machine and it's bringing on another ice age! I'll bet it's got a giant
super-computer that has outsmarted its programmers. You had all your
best computer geeks working on that instead of the Obamacare web site -
and that's why it's so screwed up. You put all the geek wannabes to work
on Obamacare and they were all morons!

Then you used the
National Security Agency to spy on all our phone calls, all our emails,
all our internet searches - so you could keep it all secret! The NSA
didn't see the Benghazi Attack coming, did it? That took you all
by surprise, and you made up a story about some stupid internet video
nobody ever saw, and you kept that story up for weeks! And the NSA
obviously wasn't keeping an eye on Syria, was it! Obama said Assad was
going to fall "any day now" and he's still in there! Hillary Clinton
said she "reset" our relations with Russia, but you didn't see the
Crimea invasion coming, did you? No! Because the NSA was so busy keeping
the Giant Anti-Global Warming Machine secret, they didn't have time to
spy on our enemies like they're supposed to. They're spying on us
instead.

And last week you said you were pulling an all-nighter
to discuss global warming. Hah! This time I believe you! You were trying
to figure out how to get a handle on that machine, because if you
don't, it's going to be like this right through 'til next winter!

Ever
since the creation in 1988 of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), it has engaged in the greatest hoax of modern
times, releasing reports that predict climate-related catastrophes as if
the climate has not been a completely natural and dynamic producer of
events that affect our lives.

The IPCC was set up by the World
Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental
Program. It has enlisted thousands of scientists to contribute to its
scare campaign, but as Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland
Institute, noted in a recent Forbes article regarding the vast
difference in the assertions of the IPCC scientists and those of its
puckishly named Nonintergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NPCC),
“What is a non-scientist to make of these dueling reports? Indeed, what
is a scientist to make of this?”

“Very few scientists are
familiar with biology, geology, physics, oceanography, engineering,
medicine, economics, and scores of other more specialized disciplines
that were the basis of the claims…” The IPCC has depended on the
ignorance of those scientists outside their particular disciplines and
recruited them to be involved in the UN hoax. The rest of us look to
them to provide guidance regarding issues involving the climate and, as a
result, have been deliberately deceived.

The NIPCC, anticipating
the latest IPCC addition to its climate scare campaign, has just issued
a new addition to its “Climate Change Reconsidered” reports. The first
volume was 850 pages long and the latest is more than 1,000 pages. It
represents the findings of scores of scientists from around the world
and thousands of peer-reviewed studies. At this point they represent
some twenty nations.

I have been an advisor to The Heartland
Institute for many years and have been exposing the climate change lies
since the late 1980s. A science writer, I have benefited from the work
of men like atmospheric physicist, S. Fred Singer, a founder of the NPCC
who has overseen five reports debunking the IPCC since 2003.

The
Heartland Institute has sponsored nine international conferences that
have brought together many scientists and others in an effort to debunk
the UN’s climate scare campaign.

I have always depended on the
common sense of people to understand that humans have nothing to do with
the climate except to endure and enjoy it. We don’t create it or
influence it.

The global warming campaign is based on the Big Lie
that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps the Sun’s heat and warms the Earth, but
the fairly miniscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (0.038%) does not
do that in a fashion that poses any threat. Indeed, it is the Sun that
determines the Earth’s climate, depending where you happen to be on the
Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it is the
“food” on which all vegetation depends. More CO2 is good. Less is not so
good.

The IPCC has depended in part on the print and broadcast
media to spread its Big Lie. It also depends on world leaders, few of
whom have any background or serious knowledge of atmospheric science, to
impose policies based on the Big Lie. These policies target the use of
“fossil fuels”, oil, coal and natural gas, urging a reduction of their
use. The world, however, utterly depends on them and, in addition to
existing reserves, new reserves are found every year.

One reason
the IPCC has been in a growing state of panic is a new, completely
natural cooling cycle based on a reduction of solar radiation. As James
M. Taylor, the managing editor of Heartland’s “Environment & Climate
News”, pointed out recently, “Winter temperatures in the contiguous
United States declined by more than a full degree Celsius (more than 2
degrees Fahrenheit) during the past twenty years.” He was citing
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. “The data
contradicts assertions that human induced global warming is causing a
rise in winter temperatures.”

In addition to the recent extremely cold winter, there have been others in 2000-2001 and 2009-2010. There will be more.

The
IPCC report is full of claims about global warming, now called “climate
change” since the world is obviously not warming. In March, Taylor
rebutted an IPCC claim that crop production is falling, noting that
global corn, rice, and wheat production have more than tripled since
1970. In recent years, the U.S. has set records for alfalfa, cotton,
beans, sugar beets, canola, corn, flaxseed, hops, rice, sorghum,
soybeans, sugarcane, sunflowers, peanuts, and wheat, to name just a few.

The
Earth would benefit from more, not less, CO2 emissions, but the Obama
administration has been engaged in imposing hundreds of new regulations
aimed at reductions. It targets the development and expansion of our
energy sector. The President has repeated the lies in his State of the
Union speeches and we have a Secretary of State, John Kerry, who insists
that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind and not the
increase of nuclear weapons.

Every one of the Earth’s seven
billion population are being subjected to the UN’s campaign of lies and
every one of us needs to do whatever we can to bring about an end to the
United Nations and reject the IPCC’s claims.

These are just some of
the environmental organizations that have for decades been pushing
for – and in many cases outright lobbying for – ever more stringent
environmental regulations to save the Earth and humanity from supposed
catastrophe. Undoubtedly the majority of the people involved with these
and other organizations are well-intentioned individuals that sincerely
believe in their cause. That is not to say, however, that they are
absolved from scrutiny as to the consequences of their (political)
actions; you judge a tree by its fruits.

As it turns out, it can
be quite convincingly argued that the very people and organizations
purportedly fighting for protection of the environment are achieving
much different outcomes, and one does not have to dig very deep at all
to discover what those outcomes really are. As you read this, understand
that this is not a ringing endorsement of a throw-away society, but
rather an honest attempt at dissecting the arguments made for
increasingly strict environmental policies and examining the results
thereof.

1. Tilting the balance in favor of large corporations

“Green”
regulations, like any and all forms of regulation, disproportionally
hurt small and medium-sized businesses. After all, large (multinational)
corporations have the financial resources and manpower that their
smaller competitors lack to deal with the regulatory burden. As such
each and every new law passed further threatens the very existence of
mom-and-pop stores in your neighborhood. And unlike multinationals they
don’t have the lobbying power to turn the regulatory tide, either. The
result? Fewer local stores in your area, forcing you to drive farther
away for your groceries. True, you will likely plan ahead to avoid
having to go to the store every day, but that means you now need a car
to transport all those groceries in. You might not have needed that car
to begin with if you could just stop by your local grocer that’s now
gone out of business.

2. Increasing pollution with “green” energy

Wind
turbines don’t come falling from the sky. They require vast amounts of
steel produced in steel mills and the fiber composite that make up the
blades is manufactured in a chemical plant. Then there is the issue of
rare earth metals (or rare earths), used in everything from electric car
batteries to wind turbines to solar panels. Nearly all production today
takes place in China, where both people and the environment suffer due
to the hazardous and radioactive byproducts released in the process.
Mines and processing plants are struggling to keep up with the demand
artificially pushed up by governments in the form of tax incentives and
massive subsidies.

3. Impoverishing people

Speaking of
subsidies, one of the major recipients has been the “green jobs”
industry. In an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, the argument is
that specific policies would lead not only to a better environment, but
also boost the economy through the creation of “good jobs”. Though the
proponents of green jobs have yet to find agreement on what defines such
a job, what has become clear is that the net effect on employment is
actually negative. In the UK 3.7 jobs are lost for every green job while
in Spain the ratio stands at 2.2 jobs lost per green job. Poof!

To
make matters worse, prominent green jobs reports such as the UNEP
report even go so far as to rail against high-productivity jobs lest
they “pose the dual challenge of environmental impact and
unemployment”[1]. Apparently the report’s authors are totally oblivious
to the fact that increased productivity is what makes a society
wealthier, and that the inefficient use of resources for the sake of
“spreading the work” will inevitably make everyone poorer.

It
goes without saying that poor people will naturally care less about the
environment and more about where their next meal is going to come from.
While rich people have the luxury of worrying about the environment,
poor people do not. So the wealthier a society, the more likely it is to
take good care of the environment.

4. Wasting resources mandating recycling

I
know this is going to sound counterintuitive – as it did to me – but
recycling does not always save energy or money. The latter makes sense
considering the top-down approach that has dominated environmental
initiatives; if there was any money in recycling, force would not have
been necessary to bring it about. New York City’s recycling program, for
instance, costs the taxpayer almost double what it would cost to just
throw glass, metal, and plastic away.

Still, it would be one
thing to spend all that taxpayer money on recycling if it actually saved
resources. Unfortunately even that is not necessarily the case. Trees
are planted and grown on tree farms specifically to make paper and as
such do not contribute to deforestation. Other materials such as glass
and aluminum can be effectively recycled, benefitting both the
environment and the economy. However, businesses involved with the
production of these materials have an inherent incentive to recycle
anyway, so there is no need for regulatory requirements there.

5. Carbon taxes

Carbon
taxes help funnel money into wind and solar power, which also come with
environmental problems even in addition to the aforementioned. Solar
thermal technology, for instance, consumes huge quantities of water –
you know, the substance that is generally already lacking in areas where
solar panels are the preferred “renewable energy” source (e.g.
California, southern Spain).

Solar panel fields and wind farms
are also very land-intensive, and wind farms negatively impact animals
in the form of habitat loss and fragmentation. Besides, few people find
wind turbines scattered over the countryside to be of benefit to the
landscape. Some even suffer negative health effects that have been
linked to living near a wind farm.

Finally, carbon taxes aggravate the aforementioned problems of favoring large over small businesses and impoverishing people.

Given
these issues it would behoove environmentalists to consider the
unintended consequences of their push for continued “climate action”,
even aside from the debate over whether or not climate change is
man-made to begin with. Having blind faith in politicians and special
interest groups that try to greenwash their agenda to appeal to your
sense of justice may not be the best strategy if you really care about
the environment.

Trouble on the prairie: Feds call chicken ‘threatened,’ but what about the residents?

The specter of big government regulation has been cast over western Kansas, and opponents are fearing the worst.

Following
the announcement Thursday that the lesser prairie-chicken has been
reclassified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, farmers,
ranchers and advocates are warning the decision will have far-reaching
effects for rural residents of the state.

“This is not a good
result for agriculture in Kansas,” said Jim Sipes, Farm Bureau director
for the southwest corner of the state. “It’s going to lead to a lot of
restrictions on land use, and that’s going to lead to a lot of energy
development issues.”

For cash-strapped rural counties in western
Kansas, Sipes said, local governments rely heavily on the energy
industry to provide a stable tax base. With added restrictions enacted
by the listing, it will only increase pressure to raise property taxes.

Ken
Klemm, a Sherman County rancher and president of the Kansas Natural
Resources Coalition, sides with other opponents in arguing that it’s the
lack of rainfall, not humanity’s encroachment, that has led to a
decline in the lesser prairie-chicken’s population in recent years.

“The heavy hand of the Endangered Species Act will not make it rain,” Klemm told Kansas Watchdog.

Klem
said the Range-wide Conservation Plan – a response from the five states
covering the chicken’s habitat intended to pre-empt the ruling – could
result in more than $2 billion in reduced property valuations. But Ron
Kaufman, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and
Tourism, says folks shouldn’t get worked up just yet.

“It is very premature to try and forecast what will happen with western Kansas,” Kaufman said.

U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service public affairs specialist Lesli Gray
reiterated to Kansas Watchdog that protections afforded under the “4(d)
rule” will protect individuals who inadvertently kill the protected
species as long as they’re enrolled in an approved conservation plan,
like the RWCP. Gray noted, however, that the agency has yet to determine
what it considers a successful recovery of the bird’s population.

“We’ll work with states and industry and other folks to develop that recovery plan,” Gray said.

But
to opponents, even more infuriating is the rationale used to justify
the decision. Both sides can agree on one thing: Lesser prairie-chicken
numbers have been on the rise since 1997, though a recent drought has
caused a significant dip. But the feds say that doesn’t go back far
enough.

According to the official ruling released Thursday
(caution: it’s a slog at 444 pages), USFWS officials are speculating on
pre-European settlement population figures as cause for such concern.

“An
examination of anecdotal information on historical numbers of lesser
prairie-chickens indicates that numbers likely have declined from
possibly millions of birds to current estimates of thousands of birds,”
the decision stated.

How’s that for certainty?

Klemm said
such a rationale is nothing short of ridiculous. “If that’s what
they’re going to use as a yardstick to judge species under the
Endangered Species act, watch out,” he stated.

Klemm added that the KNRC will look to join any legal action taken against the federal government because of the decision.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

1 April, 2014

An apologetic tone this time

The
latest IPCC report has got a lot of publicity wordwide. In
Australia, the most Leftist newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, had a
real blast today with 3 articles derived from the UN report.

What
is notable, however, is the apologetic nature of the coverage.
They admit we have heard all this before and admit it is
exaggerated. They clearly have no hope of new converts to
Warmism.

In
the lobby of the Sydney aquarium where the Australian launch of the
UN’s latest climate change report was released on Monday is a terrifying
great white shark.

The beast measures 7.5 metres long with a
razor-toothed mouth so big it could easily swallow a human whole. It
looks at least as big as the fibreglass monster used in the movie Jaws.

Thankfully,
the aquarium shark is only a model. In real life, the biggest great
white ever reliably measured was 6.4 metres. That’s still a whopper; the
average mature specimen is four to five metres.

Why make a
ridiculously outsized model for an aquarium? For effect, of course, to
get the paying public in. Give ‘em a good scare.

Some of the
authors of part of the latest climate report from the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have done something similar:

“In
short, human-driven climate change poses a great threat, unprecedented
in type and scale, to well-being, health and perhaps even to human
survival.”

They might be able to argue the threat to well-being
and health, but human survival? A temperature rise, even at the extreme
end of projections, of four to five degrees Celsius, does not plausibly
threaten homo sapiens with extinction.

The three scientists who
wrote this summary for the website The Conversation are Anthony
McMichael of ANU, and Colin Butler and Helen Berry of the University of
Canberra. They contributed to the report’s chapter on health effects of
climate change.

Presumably they’re trying to help the cause of
addressing climate change, using outlandish fears to attract attention.
More likely they will undermine it by scaremongering.

The two
scientists who conducted the report’s Australian launch on Monday, both
lead authors of the official IPCC report, would not defend the
extinction claim.

A
credible advocate of action, the Climate Institute’s John Connor, used
the same word – “extreme” – when asked what he thought of the claim of
the possible extinction of humanity.

Perhaps the three are
frustrated by the pace of official action to limit carbon emissions.
That’s understandable. The carbon concentration in the global atmosphere
hit 400 parts per million last year, the highest in millions of years,
according to ice core samples, and continues to rise at an average pace
of two parts per million a year.

“We are on an inexorable march
to 450 ppm and much higher levels” remarked a NASA scientist and program
manager, Michael Gunson. “These were the targets for stabilisation
suggested not too long ago. The world is quickening the rate of
accumulation of CO2, and has shown no signs of slowing this down.”

The only serious way carbon output can be prudently managed is by the world’s governments.

Global
government action has to catch up with change in the planet. But
hysteria and exaggeration from concerned scientists won’t help. It will
only damage their cause.

The three scaremongers undercut the work
of the other scientists, the 309 lead authors and the other 433
contributing authors of Monday’s report.

The overall thrust of the IPCC report is credible and resists overreach.

It
projects, for instance, that an extra two degrees of warming could lead
to the loss of 2 per cent of global GDP, rather than the 5 per cent
forecast by one of the earlier estimates, that of Britain’s Nicholas
Stern.

And there’s certainly no need to exaggerate the dangers.
The world is on a carbon trajectory for 4 degrees of warming above
pre-industrial levels.

This will pose “large risks to global and
regional food security,” the IPCC warns, and “compromise normal human
activities like growing food or working outdoors for some parts of the
year.”

And it’s not all about the future; many effects are
already upon us. In its annual report on world climate, the World
Meteorological Organisation pointed to unusual weather events from
Cairo’s first snowfall in a century to the widest US tornado on record.

Every
continent, including Antarctica, saw some sort of record-breaking
weather. The WMO said no single event could be attributed directly to
climate change:

“But many of the extreme events of 2013 were
consistent with what we would expect as a result” of man-made climate
change, said the organisation’s secretary general, Michel Jarraud.

Its
report included, for the first time, a separate sub-section on
Australia. It pointed out that national 12-month temperature records
were set for the periods ending in three consecutive months last year –
in August, another in September, and a third October, topped off by a
new record for the calendar year 2013.

These record Australian
temperatures were notable because they occurred during a phase of the El
Nina cycle that normally brings cooler conditions, not hotter.

Drawing
on the work of Sophie Lewis and David Karoly of Melbourne University’s
Centre of Excellence on Climate System Science, the report simulated
conditions for 13,000 different climate years considering natural
factors only.

They found Australia’s record hot 2013 would have
been “virtually impossible without human contributions of heat-trapping
gases, illustrating that some extreme events are becoming much more
likely due to climate change.”

The world’s people need to know
the science, so they can demand action from the world’s politicians. For
scientists to scaremonger just gives recalcitrant politicians an easy
way to laugh them off.

There
is still great uncertainty about the impacts of climate change,
according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, released today. So if we are to survive and prosper,
rather than trying to fend off specific threats like cyclones, we must
build flexible and resilient societies.

Today's report is the
second of three instalments of the IPCC's fifth assessment of climate
change. The first instalment, released last year, covered the physical
science of climate change. It stated with increased certainty that
climate change is happening, and that it is the result of humanity's
greenhouse gas emissions. The new report focuses on the impacts of
climate change and how to adapt to them. The third instalment, on how to
cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes out in April.

The latest
report backs off from some of the predictions made in the previous IPCC
report, in 2007. During the final editing process, the authors also
retreated from many of the more confident projections from the final
draft, leaked last year. The IPCC now says it often cannot predict which
specific impacts of climate change – such as droughts, storms or floods
– will hit particular places.

Instead, the IPCC focuses on how
people can adapt in the face of uncertainty, arguing that we must become
resilient against diverse changes in the climate.

"The natural
human tendency is to want things to be clear and simple," says the
report's co-chair Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in
Stanford, California. "And one of the messages that doesn't just come
from the IPCC, it comes from history, is that the future doesn't ever
turn out the way you think it will be." That means, Field adds, that
"being prepared for a wide range of possible futures is just always
smart".

Here New Scientist breaks down what is new in the report,
and what it means for humanity's efforts to cope with a changing
climate. A companion article, "How climate change will affect where you
live", highlights some of the key impacts that different regions are
facing.

What has changed in the new IPCC report?In essence,
the predictions are intentionally more vague. Much of the firmer
language from the 2007 report about exactly what kind of weather to
expect, and how changes will affect people, has been replaced with more
cautious statements. The scale and timing of many regional impacts, and
even the form of some, now appear uncertain.

For example, the
2007 report predicted that the intensity of cyclones over Asia would
increase by 10 to 20 per cent. The new report makes no such claim.
Similarly, the last report estimated that climate change would force up
to a quarter of a billion Africans into water shortage by the end of
this decade. The new report avoids using such firm numbers.

The
report has even watered down many of the more confident predictions that
appeared in the leaked drafts. References to "hundreds of millions" of
people being affected by rising sea levels have been removed from the
summary, as have statements about the impact of warmer temperatures on
crops.

"I think it's gone back a bit," says Jean Palutikof of
Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, who worked on
the 2007 report. "That may be a good thing. In the fourth [climate
assessment] we tried to do things that weren't really possible and the
fifth has sort of rebalanced the whole thing."

So do we know less than we did before?Not
really, says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in
Sydney, Australia. It is just more rigorous language. "Pointing to the
sign of the change, rather than the precise magnitude of the change, is
scientifically more defensible," he says.

We also know more about
what we don't know, says David Karoly at the University of Melbourne.
"There is now a better understanding of uncertainties in regional
climate projections at decadal timescales."

British
officials were last night accused of ‘political interference’ in a
crucial report on international climate change. The economic
impact of global warming was ramped up in the final draft by the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Shortly before
authors wrote the final version, a British Government official passed
scientists a note complaining about an earlier, more moderate draft.

The
official, from Ed Davey’s Department for Energy and Climate Change,
said the economic section of the report was at best an ‘under-estimate’
and at worst ‘completely meaningless’.

The final document, published today in Japan, increases the predicted economic impact of global warming.

Critics
said the suggestion of political interference by the Coalition, which
set out to be the ‘greenest government ever’, was alarming.

Tory
MP Peter Bone said: ‘It is always the same with climate change. If the
facts don’t suit them, they change it to suit them. ‘A
Government official interfering with an independent scientific report is
ridiculous. What you want?…?is what the independent scientific
community thinks – not what people want them to say for their political
purposes.’

The IPCC report is the first comprehensive analysis in
seven years of the global consequences of climate change. It warns that
the world is ‘ill-prepared’ and that the effects are ‘already occurring
on all continents and across the oceans’.

Rising temperatures,
droughts and heatwaves will threaten food supplies and human health,
while hundreds of millions of people will be hit by coastal flooding, it
finds.

The report, by more than 300 authors, informs policy decisions of governments around the world.

But
one of its contributors has accused the IPCC of being too ‘alarmist’ –
and demanded his name be withdrawn. Professor Richard Tol, an economist
at the University of Sussex, said the drafts had been changed to make
the findings more ‘apocalyptic’. He said colleagues ‘drifted too far to
the alarmist side’ and were likening climate change to the ‘four
horsemen of the apocalypse’.

His section of the report, based on
18 economic studies, predicted in early drafts that global warming of
2.5C would cut economic output by between 0.2 and 2 per cent a year –
much less than previous estimates of up to 20 per cent.

But the
final IPCC report labels his predictions ‘incomplete estimates’. It
states: ‘Losses are more likely than not to be greater?…?than this
range.’

Britain, among other nations, lobbied for this highly
significant change. On Friday, before final drafting discussions, the
British government submitted a note faulting the draft.

It said:
‘The quoted figures of 0.2 to 2 per cent of GDP [gross domestic product]
are at best an under-estimate, and at worst completely meaningless.’

Other
governments including Belgium, France and Norway also complained. But
Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC writers, last night dismissed
criticism of the last-minute alteration and said the final report gave a
‘much clearer picture’.

Despite praising Professor Tol as a
‘wonderful scientist’, Professor Field of Stanford University, added:
‘There were a couple of meaningful errors in the way Richard had done
his analysis.’

Mr Davey said: ‘The science has spoken?…?This
evidence builds the case for early action?…?We cannot afford to wait.’ A
DECC spokesman said climate change impacts could be ‘catastrophic’,
adding: ‘These cannot be underestimated and the UK Government, as well
as other countries, are seeking to make sure this is understood the
world over.’

But Professor Gordon Hughes, an environmental
economist at Edinburgh University, said: ‘The IPCC has been a political
body ever since it started?…?this is political interference.

Scientist
behind the Gaia hypothesis says environment movement does not pay
enough attention to facts and he was too certain in the past about
rising temperatures

The 94 year-old scientist, famous for his
Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating, single organism, also
said that he had been too certain about the rate of global warming in
his past book, that "it’s just as silly to be a [climate] denier as it
is to be a believer” and that fracking and nuclear power should power
the UK, not renewable sources such as windfarms.

Speaking to the
Guardian for an interview ahead of a landmark UN climate science report
on Monday on the impacts of climate change, Lovelock said of the
warnings of climate catastrophe in his 2006 book, Revenge of Gaia: "I
was a little too certain in that book. You just can’t tell what’s going
to happen."

“It [the impact from climate change] could be
terrible within a few years, though that’s very unlikely, or it could be
hundreds of years before the climate becomes unbearable," he said.

Lovelock's
comments appear to be at odds with dire forecasts from a report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday, which leaked
versions show will warn that even small temperature rises will bring
"abrupt and irreversible changes" to natural systems, including Arctic
sea ice and coral reefs.

Asked if his remarks would give
ammunition to climate change sceptics, he said: "It’s just as silly to
be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can’t be certain."

Talking
about the environmental movement, Lovelock says: "It’s become a
religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts." The retired
scientist, who worked at the Medical Research Council, describes himself
as an "old-fashioned green."

Lovelock reiterated his support for
fracking for shale gas, which has been strongly backed by David Cameron
and the government but vigorously opposed by anti-fracking activists
and local people at sites from Salford to Balcombe in West Sussex.

“The
government is too frightened to use nuclear, renewables won’t work
–because we don’t have enough sun – and we can’t go on burning coal
because it produces so much CO2, so that leaves fracking. It produces
only a fraction of the amount of CO2 that coal does, and will make
Britain secure in energy for quite a few years. We don’t have much
choice," he said.

94% of Electricity in 2013 Came from sources Greenies don't like: Reactors, Dams and Fossil Fuels

Ninety-four
percent of the electricity generated in the United States in 2013 came
from nuclear reactors, dams, and fossil fuels--including petroleum,
natural gas, other gases, and coal--according to a new report from the
U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration.

Only 0.2
percent of U.S. electricity during the year came from solar-power
sources, and another 4.1 percent came from wind power.

In total,
the United States generated a net of 4,058,209 million kilowatthours of
electricity in 2013. That was up slightly—0.26 percent--from the
4,047,765 million KWH generated in 2012. But it remained less than
4,156,745 million KWH generated in 2007, which remains the peak year for
U.S. electricity generation.

electricityCoal-fired
electricity production, which rebounded last year after two years of
decline, was the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2013. It
produced 1,585,998 million KWH—up 4.8 percent from the 1,514,043 million
KWH produced in 2012.

Coal-produced electricity in 2013 was
still down 21.3 percent from its peak in 2007, when coal plants in the
United States produced 2,016,456 million KWH.

In 2013, natural
gas was the second greatest source of U.S. electricity, producing
1,113,665 million KWH. Nuclear power plants were the third largest
source, producing 789,017 million KWH. And conventional hydroelectric
power was the fourth greatest source, producing 269,136 million KWH
hours.

A
Cornell University statistician is debunking a study indirectly funded
by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that “uses a
predator-prey model of humans and nature” - with humans as “predators”
and nature as “prey”- to predict the collapse of human
civilization unless it reaches a “sustainable equilibrium.”

After
analyzing the collapses of advanced civilizations over the past 5,000
years, including the Roman Empire, the Mayans, and the Han Dynasty, the
study concludes: “In order to reach a sustainable equilibrium in an
unequal society, it is necessary to have policies that limit inequality
and ensure birth rates remain below critical levels.” (See
motesharrei-rivas-kalnay.pdf)

“Given economic stratification,
collapse is very difficult to avoid and requires major policy changes,
including major reductions in inequality and population growth rates,”
authors Safa Motesharrei, Eugenia Kalnay, and Jorge Rivas say in the
study, which was first reported by The Guardian.

The authors
adapted a NASA-funded mathematical model on climate change to compare an
Egalitarian society (“No-Elites”), an Equitable society (“Workers and
Non-Workers with the same level of consumption”), and an Unequal society
(“Elites and Commoners”) – the latter of which they say most closely
reflects current conditions throughout the world.

They warn that
societal collapse occurs when the Elites have “consumed too much," as
measured in "eco-dollars," and the Commoner population starts dying off
due to famine because their numbers exceed Nature’s “carrying capacity.”

“The
results of our experiments…indicate that either one of the two features
apparent in historical societal collapse – over-exploitation of natural
resources and strong economic stratification – can independently result
in a complete collapse,” the study noted, resulting in either a Type-L
(“inequality-induced famine” which results in a “Disappearance of
Labor”) or a Type-N (“depletion of natural resources” or “exhaustion of
Nature”) collapse.

“This NASA-funded study makes case that future
is socialism or extinction,” Derrick O’Keefe, a contributor to
Ecosocialism Canada, summarized in a tweet.

But the study is
fatally flawed, according to William “Matt” Briggs, a statistical
consultant and adjunct professor of statistical science at Cornell
University and author of Breaking the Law of Averages: Real Life
Probability and Statistics in Plain English.

Using a
predator-prey model, the “Human and Nature Dynamics” (HANDY) study
“swaps the wolves for human beings and the deer for ‘Nature.’ Just how
people prey on Nature is not too clear, especially since people are part
of Nature,” writes Briggs in a stinging critique of the study.

Since
“nothing empirical went into these equations,” the study’s doomsday
conclusions “have no applicability whatsoever to humans,” Briggs told
CNSNews.com.

“All of the flaws - when they give interpretations
to all of those letters, the x’s, the c’s, the Greek letters that they
have sprinkled throughout. Those interpretations are just pulled out of
the sky, and have nothing to do with any real human society,” Briggs
said.

The mathematical equations, he added, are "flawless as far
as I can tell, the derivations, the sets of equations, all that kind of
stuff. The problem is, all those symbols - they don’t mean anything.

“They
attached meaning to those symbols. They said, ‘Well, let’s let this
particular variable be Equality, and let this one be Elites, and let
this one be Commoners,' and then they, you know, tweaked these
parameters they have in the equation and give them various pictures.
Now, I could have called them, you know, the number of banana exports
and I don’t know, shipping traffic or anything, I mean.

“The math
is fine, it’s the interpretation that’s on top of it. There’s nothing
empirical that went into these equations, if you understand me. There’s
no observations that went into [them], all right, let’s look at the
actual state of equality, whatever that is, let's look at the actual
sort of eco-dollars (I guess they call them, they never really quite
define that), and let’s measure that somehow and then we’ll put these
into an equation and then we'll model that reality.

"They did
none of that kind of thing. They just developed a set of equations and
then said, ‘This is the way reality should look.’ And of course, reality
doesn’t look anything like that, as I tried to point out.”

In
fact, Briggs says, real-world historical evidence points in the opposite
direction. For example, he notes that being a “Commoner” now comes with
a much higher risk factor for obesity in the U.S. and other developed
nations, thanks to discoveries made by "Elites" of how to grow food more
efficiently for a growing population.

"We used to call that progress," he told CNSNews.com.

And,
he added, history also shows that socialist societies whose main goal
is egalitarianism are actually more likely to collapse than their
capitalistic counterparts:

“The HANDY model says Unequal
societies must collapse. But which societies, say over the last century,
in reality gave up their ghosts?” Briggs asks. “We must ignore those
that collapsed because of war (such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Cambodia) or politics (e.g. Rhodesia, Czechoslovakia) because HANDY is
silent on these important subjects. The remaining collapses were those
societies which were Egalitarian (e.g. the Soviet Union, Cambodia
again?)”

Nevertheless, he told CNSNews.com, "no amount of failed
forecasts is sufficient to talk these people out of the notion that
disaster is right around the corner. It’s a matter of faith.”

According
to the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center SESYNC,
“Motesharrei received minor support from NASA to develop a coupled earth
system model. Some of this funding was spent on the mathematical
development of the HANDY model.”

But in a statement last week, the space agency distanced itself from the study:

“A
soon-to-be published research paper, 'Human and Nature Dynamics
(HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or
Sustainability of Societies' by Univeristy of Maryland researchers Safa
Motesharrei and Eugenia Kalnay, and University of Minnesota's Jorge
Rivas, was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA.

“It is an
independent study by the university researchers utilizing research
tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all
independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those
of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its
conclusions."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That
the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however
disputed.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any
given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about
100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much
seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in
average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless
altogether. Warmism is a money-grubbing racket, not science.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by
experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you
believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians,
nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers".
It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an"
could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed
holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household
items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays",
"might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global
cooling

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has
been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;
indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a
widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is
nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run
the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of
the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development
of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes
involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer
driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on
hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off
abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the
real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my
research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much
writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in
detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that
field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because
no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped
that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I
have shifted my attention to health related science and climate
related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic.
Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental
research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers
published in both fields during my social science research career

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is
reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global
warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It
seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in
global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics
or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future.
Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities
in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism
is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known
regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are
on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the
science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let
alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world.
Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a
scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to
be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be
none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions.
Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would
disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific
statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a
psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to
be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous
pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation
of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that
suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old
guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be
unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with
tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can
afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society
today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were.
But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that
seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count
(we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader
base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an
enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the
weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate
50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met
Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The
Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because
they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their
global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here)
that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative
donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they
agree with

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the
Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a
pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we
worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that
clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down
when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years
poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that
might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid
their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback
that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2
and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence
gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years
show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2
will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to
bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to
increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the
plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its
carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It
admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast
filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of
the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather
improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the
universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for
making up such an implausible tale.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "HEAT TRAPPING GAS". A gas can become
warmer by contact with something warmer or by infrared radiation
shining on it or by adiabatic (pressure) effects but it cannot trap
anything. Air is a gas. Try trapping something with it!

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all
logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level
rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the
average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting
point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the
Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which
NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees.
So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And
the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not
raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of
Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the
water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated
it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with
that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The
whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening
of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen:
"We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of
decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very
partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw
data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that
it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones'
Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate
data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make
the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given
conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive
such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real
environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more
motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity
that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence
showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of
the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty
and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of
the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to
admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the
date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been
clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that
saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of
society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that
fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called
phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming
is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so
Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people
want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing
all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the
real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better
than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all
Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a
Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global
Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie
panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a
new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The
real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong.
The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly
"Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first
performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop.
Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first
performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience
walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate
are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913,
we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that
supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note
also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably
well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming
denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it.
That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses
believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say
that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed --
and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when
people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as
too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy.
Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common
hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact
that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few
additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a
hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we
breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical
to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad
enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not
to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the
ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research
grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of
money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some
belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of
"The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked
event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist
instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without
material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such
people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example.
Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that
instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious
committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them
to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them
to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and
folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES
beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any
known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough
developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil
fuel theory

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this,
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light;
preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts
shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that
his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes
to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the
earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise
reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so
small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally
without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a
time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures
tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th
century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because
they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely.
But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern
hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the
world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is
claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since
seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to
even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility.
Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the
atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the
oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No
comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base
balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational
basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units
has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air
movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an
unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate
experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables
over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years
hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In
such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and
are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts
production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to
be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to
every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper
was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film.
It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account
fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is
nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a
Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven
climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of
the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the
paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in
recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie
mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that
reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented
July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even
have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact
that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving
into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got
the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The
modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by
Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the
number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an
acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient
between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was
doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green,
Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished
the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in
Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in
1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and
economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The
correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."
So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the
Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature
rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if
measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been
considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar
cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal
electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic
to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the
article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename
the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/